Loafhead

Homo branchia takes as its starting point an illustration from John Sterling Kingsley’s Elements of Comparative Zoology (1897), depicting gill-like structures in the human embryo as evidence of our evolutionary relationship with aquatic life. The work brings this image into dialogue with the Cascais tide gauge, installed in 1877 and one of the oldest still operating in Europe, whose measurements provide a historical record of changing sea levels.

Bringing evolutionary history into contact with projections of future sea-level rise, Homo branchia considers our shifting relationship with water: from evolutionary origin and source of wellbeing to an increasingly unavoidable environmental condition. If the transition from water to land took millions of years, the work asks what forms of adaptation might be demanded by its reversal — and at what speed.