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Planetary Cognitive Ecologies: Gondwana is research-creation in which scientific method is the medium. Around 290 million years ago, forests of Glossopteris covered the supercontinent of Gondwana, and the carbon that escaped fungal decay became the coal still burned across South Africa, India, and Australia. Glossopteris left no recoverable sequence, so the work uses ancestral sequence reconstruction to reach the proteins of the world it lived in rather than the plant itself. Through phylogenetics and computational protein engineering, Scholtz joins two reconstructions into a single fusion protein: a fungal wood-decay enzyme and the ancestral form of a plant desiccation-protection protein, a compact enzyme wrapped by an extended protective one, the preserving half embracing the destroying half it protects. This is Empedocles’ Love producing Strife rather than alternating with it: combination that contains separation.
The protein being protected is the one that destroys. Drying activates the protective protein and generates hydrogen peroxide, the co-substrate the enzyme consumes, so the same condition triggers preservation and decay.
Elements of Gondwana are conceptually reassembled from real coordinates at Beardmore Glacier in Antarctica, Bajo de La Leona in Argentina, and Lootsberg Pass in the Karoo, South Africa. These sites served as research terrain for the fusion protein rather than as setting for it. The Beardmore Glacier fossil record anchors the fungal enzyme; Lootsberg Pass holds glossopterid roots and the boundary that ends them; the plant protein derives from no single site but from reconstruction across living seed plant lineages.
A virtual reality work translocates the viewer into the reassembled terrain, drawn from real coordinates at sites that were once continuous and are now separated by oceans. The reconstruction returns a viewer to a place that no longer exists: Karen Bakker’s argument that instruments extend perception into registers closed to unaided senses.
The fusion protein is shown folded, its surfaces ranging from hand-ground locally sourced coal and foraged ochre to speculative materials, so that a protein both ancestral and synthetic is never given a single settled materiality. Its movement comes from the prediction itself: each residue is animated by the confidence the structural model held in it, so the least certain positions never come to rest.
A streamgraph holds the research itself in strata: the breaking of Gondwana against the raising of the Himalayas, the phylogenetic relations the reconstruction depended on, and an archaeology of screenshots from the artist’s year of research, failed and successful experimentation, and learning unfamiliar tools.
Mark-making is used to hold elements of terrain and strata on Yupo and mirror, made with the same coal and ochre alongside bio-based inks such as avocado seed and Japanese mineral pigments (iwa enogu), their suspension in water and deposition, the image being what the drying leaves behind. The protein works to the same condition: water holds it in one state, and its loss triggers another. On the mirrored works, decals of the protein render share the surface with the deposits, and the reflection places the viewer inside time and strata.
The work is further positioned through Lukáš Likavčan’s comparative planetology and Laura Tripaldi’s work on material intelligence and soft technology.
Gondwana’s breaking was catastrophic and generative at once: the same rupture that tore the continent apart drove a fragment into Asia and raised the Himalayas, which are still rising. The fusion protein was made as a statement rather than in answer to a research question, and a possible application emerged from making it. If ancient protective chemistry holds better than its modern descendants, the implications run toward bioremediation and closed systems in space. In this time of great upheaval, the work holds disruption and possibility together at molecular and planetary scale, across deep time and into a future that currently remains uncertain.