In Wales and round about Wales ({{{:)
„i have read eaten your book with more pain than pleasure“ Adam Sedgwick Trilobite to Charles Darwin 1859
In the beginning there was the trilobite…and masses of it “dawdled” around (file under: “to dawdle – to daddle – to play” [Rainald Goetz: Abfall für Alle (Garbage for Everyone). 1999, p. 18.]) in the primordial oceans of the Cambrian period around 521 million years ago. We owe the term and concept of the Cambrian to Adam Sedgwick, one of the fathers of modern geology, who, in 1835, gave the Latin name of Wales (Cambria) to the clay slate strata which were first exposed in the north of that country. Since the Cambrian, quite a lot of water has evaporated. At some point the trilobite, because it did not want to go ashore, had to bite the dust. Today only fossilized exoskeletons bear witness to its once abundant existence. Sadly extinct. Bloody “survival of the fittest”! Rest in peace, little crab.
Ok, don't fall asleep. Fast forward. we're almost there.
Tobi Keck transfers the evolutionary madness of the “Cambrian explosion” directly into our present day by making trilobites and slates tangible in his “Eater of Worlds” exhibition and erecting a site of cult worship for the prehistoric crustacean. We are offered a playful time travel experience that builds an aesthetic bridge between the ages. Thus, a kind of bracket is created ({{{:), which encompasses a timespan of over 500 million years.
Can we perhaps go one size smaller? No! "I am eternal, child. I am the eater of worlds, and of children. And you are next!" (Pennywise a.k.a. Stephen King's IT [the clown, not the band])
Keck himself is a seeker who takes the eternally recurring world eater (a.k.a. trilobite) very seriously, declaring it his personal hobbyhorse, which has accompanied him in his artistic practice since 2015. He mourns for its passing and at the same time cannot fully come to terms with the extinction of the little scavengers and recyclers; he reproduces the trilobite en masse and thus keeps it alive artistically and artificially. The resistant crustacean appears again and again and again, becoming a wanderer between worlds, as it were. An original fossil, which lies in a glass coffin at the center of the exhibition, is a reminder of its past and its death.
Calm down! I am not dead! Which part of eternal did you not understand?
However, this is not a coffin at all, but a terrarium, and creatures with visual echoes of the fossil - revenants - live here in harmonious neighbourliness with their predecessor. Quite lively Rollie Pollies dawdle around on this Bio-TV, eating and reproducing live, and feeding the fiction of the small “Cambrian Park”. Digitally reproduced and lovingly scripted, the best scenes from this drama of (isopod) life appear again on the big LED screen on the front wall. Double utilization, so to speak. And besides, given the attention span of our digital present, no one can really expect us to wait and watch… remember: thou art mortal!
As a mass-produced plaster replica, the heaped fossil encounters us once again at the calvariae locum or “place of the skull”. The ideal place for a brief meditation on the tense relationship between image and likeness, original and copy, past and future, as well as (re)production and consumption. Mass-produced, the trilobite also appears as an emoticon in its latest transformation for the time being. In this form, presumably discovered by Tobi Keck, the Eater of Worlds conquers the digital space in an abstract and symbolic way as a logo/brand. A renewed return to the analogue space can be seen in the stamp print and the large slate wall work. Here the bracket is finally closed, as clay slate, trilobite and digital continuation come together as a symbol. Geology, biology, industry, culture, nature and digitality dance a roundelay, whirling as a vortex-like “everflow”, into which Tobi Keck lustily draws us… “And you are next!”
Text by Dr. Markus Wiegandt, Literary scholar, University of Leipzig (GER), June 2025; English translation by Ella Krivanek
Exhibition poster design by Twee Whistler
The exhibition was kindly funded by Liebelt Stiftung Hamburg