Faivovich & Goldberg: Un meteorito para la Sociedad Científica Argentina del año 2105

Fundación Klemm is pleased to announce the beginning of its pro tempore custody of Un meteorito para la Sociedad Científica Argentina del año 2105, a work by the artist duo Faivovich & Goldberg with a horizon at the dawn of the twenty-second century.

When the Sociedad Científica Argentina (SCA) once again decides the fate of the meteorite on July 9, 2105, this act will stand among its antecedents. On October 1, 2026, in a private ceremony held in one of the Fundación’s galleries before a limited number of witnesses, the first institutional custody agreement for the work was signed. 

Speaking at the ceremony were Cintia Mezza, Head of Collection, Archive and Public Programs, Fundación Klemm; Sergio Baur, President of the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes (ANBA); Matilde Marín, Chair of the Fundación’s Board of Administration; and José Sellés-Martínez, First Vice President of the SCA. The work enters the Klemm Collection as the first long-term loan agreement recorded in its inventory, cared for alongside its own holdings until 2032.

Following the signing, the capsule was hoisted in a first fitting of the installation. A steel ring embraced the gallery’s central column. From it extended the Escala Pro Tempore, a three-meter iron bar that segments the time of work, and from its end hung the piece.

The work holds a 41-kilogram iron meteorite, received by the artists in 2016 from an anonymous benefactor, on whose behalf they sought to donate it to the SCA. That donation could not be completed. Faced with that impossibility, Faivovich & Goldberg transformed an unfinished process into a time capsule: the meteorite was encapsulated in May 25, 2018, and the decision on its fate deferred to July 9, 2105. On that date, the SCA may once again choose to incorporate into its holdings the meteorite resting in the belly of the sculpture.

Conceived from the outset as a durational work, the piece poses a problem of intergenerational transmission: how to sustain, over eighty-seven years, the material, legal, symbolic, and economic legibility of a will addressed to future generations. After a foundational custody held by the artists from 2018 to 2025, whose conclusion was certified through a blockchain record, the work moves through a sequence of custodies, passing from one custodian to the next every seven years—a septennium—until a final three-year term closes the chain. Through this system of circulation, the artists articulate mechanisms of governance that safeguard the integrity of the work along its journey toward the next century, while opening new narratives around acquisition, display, and conservation. It offers Fundacion Klemm an opportunity to communicate to future generations the responsibility involved in projecting its Collection over time.

The Fundación is the first institution to take on this task. In his will, Federico Klemm established that upon his death the ANBA would join the Fundación’s Board of Administration, and that once the fund sustaining the institution was exhausted, the Collection would be bequeathed to the Argentine State. As Cintia Mezza noted during the ceremony, the Fundación owns neither the meteorite nor the Collection: it is the temporary custodian of both, bound to defer decisions about their fate to the future and its new voices. Both are wills projected beyond those who formulated them, and both rest on an act of trust. 

Over the course of its septennium, the Fundación proposes three lines of work. The first is an Annual Colloquium, held every October 1, on heritage management, collection transitions, and institutional temporalities. The second brings teenagers from its Learning Program into the Colloquium through partnerships with high schools and universities. The third envisions an Association of Friends of the Future, devoted to carrying forward Federico Klemm’s guiding principles—the prize for young artists, free admission, education, and the memory held in archives.

In 2032, the capsule will leave the Fundación for a custodian yet to be named. Seventy-three years will still separate it from its rendezvous.