The Gallery, the London Interdisciplinary School, London E1 1EW · 2024

Tracing the evolutionary tree back far enough leads us to the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) — a single-celled organism that lived over four billion years ago in the thermal vents of deep-sea volcanoes. This exhibition pairs LUCA with another speculative figure — the Last Thinking Being (LTB) — to explore the tenuous thread that connects life’s beginnings and its ultimate end, reflecting on the fragility and unpredictability of existence.

Invoking the unsettling premise of Ray Bradbury’s “The Sound of Thunder,” where a single misstep in the past alters the future irrevocably, the exhibition frames LUCA as representing the infinite creative energy of life, while embodying the possibility of unfulfilled potential. The speculative conversation between LUCA and the LTB imagines what literary theorist Kate Marshall describes as “a world that can be narrated after human consciousness has been obliterated.”

The gallery space transforms into a site where LUCA and the LTB converse across vast expanses of deep time — unfolding through SEADS’ visuals and soundscapes, Mary Pedicini’s sculptures, and Hanne Peeraer’s painting, examining mortality, extinction, and the end of time. LUCA collapses the boundaries between species, inviting us to consider ourselves as deeply intertwined with all other forms of life.

On the final day of the exhibition, Hanne Peeraer hosted a series of short meditations in interaction with the work. Viewers wore the Muse 2, a portable EEG headset that captured their brainwave data and informed the digital creature how to evolve in response — changing colour and shape depending on their levels of meditative brainwaves, creating a positive neural feedback loop.

The Gallery at LIS · seads.network/project/luca