Rodrigo Hernández, The Long Pond (2026). Installation view at Stilltetuin as part of Contour Biennale 11. Photos: Alhasan Yousef and Filip Claessens. Courtesy of the artists and Contour Biennale.
Here, Rodrigo Hernández presents The Long Pond, a new permanent sculpture in which two bronze figures linger somewhere between sleep and wakefulness. Mirroring one another, they seem to move slowly towards and away from each other, their open eyes searching for the other’s gaze.
Rodrigo Hernández works across drawing, painting, relief, sculpture, and installation, with a practice shaped by poetry, philosophy, literature, and dreams. Drawing on a wide constellation of references, including Pre-Columbian art, Japanese printmaking, European modernism, mythology, and scientific imagery, Hernández constructs visual languages in which intimacy, symbolism, and memory intersect.
In The Long Pond, two bronze casts rest on the grass: heads of a couple, almost identical, mirroring one another. Each gently presses an ear to a hand, poised at the edge of sleep, while their open eyes search for the other’s gaze. Timeless and suspended, the figures seem to drift slowly towards and away from one another. Their faces are familiar yet elusive, hovering at the edge of recognition: less portraits than placeholders for projection, reflection, and desire.
In an accompanying poem, Hernández recalls his partner’s voice in the moments before sleep: ‘I was wondering how quickly you will forget about me’. The line lingers as a whispered afterimage, articulating the anxiety that love, stretched across distance, might dissolve.
Sun 6 Sep, time
Collective Rest
Rodrigo Hernández
You are invited to do nothing. To be still, to be quiet, to look at the sky before closing your eyes. To smell the grass and feel the wind move gently from one side to the other—the same wind that carried you here, whether you arrived on foot or by bike.
This forty-minute gathering, conceived by Rodrigo Hernández, draws on shikantaza, a term often translated as “just sitting” or “sitting and doing nothing,” and a central practice of Sōtō Zen Buddhism. Rather than a technique to master or a goal to achieve, shikantaza offers an invitation to simply be here, becoming available to what is, without effort or expectation. Together, we will return to a quieter, more receptive state of awareness—perhaps recalling the naps we took as children at school, lying together on the floor of a room slowly softened by silence.
Bring a picnic blanket or towel, and a pillow if you would like one. Wear comfortable clothes, and please set your phone to silent—or turn it off altogether. This event is weather-dependent.
Sun 6 Sep, time
The Vegetal Roots of Dreaming
Michael Marder and Rodrigo Hernández
What if dreaming does not belong to the human mind alone? In a recent book, philosopher
Michael Marder revisits psychoanalysis through an ecological lens, asking how plants, animals, minerals, landscapes, and other-than-human forms of life participate in shaping psychic existence. Among its many provocations, the book turns to “green dreams” and to the possibility of understanding the unconscious as an ecological field rather than an exclusively human interior.
In this conversation with artist Rodrigo Hernández, Marder considers how these ideas resonate with Hernández’s exploration of myth, metamorphosis, childhood, desire, and the porous boundaries between human and more-than-human life. How might vegetal life offer another model for thinking about the unconscious? What can dreams reveal when we loosen the distinction between inner and outer worlds, psyche and environment, imagination and materiality? And what might it mean to cultivate forms of attention capable of sensing the life that surrounds, sustains, and exceeds us?
Bringing philosophy and artistic practice into dialogue, The Vegetal Roots of Dreaming explores dreaming as a mode of ecological perception.
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