What does it mean to be responsible for a future none of us will live to see? The question sounds abstract until it encounters a control panel: rows of buttons, switches and displays – built to allow people to control a vast technical facility. In Emilija Škarnulytė’s film from the decommissioned Ignalina nuclear power plant in Lithuania, a python glides across this panel. The scene, as described by the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, places two kinds of time alongside one another: the lifespan of technological systems and the unwavering presence of non-human life.
“Arrow of Time” at the Lokremise combines film, light and sculptural interventions. Offering a first-hand account of the spatial experience without having visited would be dishonest. Yet even the documented starting point reveals a productive tension: art cannot depict vast timescales as though they were landscapes that could be surveyed from the outside. It can, however, shift the scales on which we think about the present and responsibility.
The control panel and the snake
Ignalina was not an arbitrary subject. The museum describes the Lithuanian plant as a “sister plant” to Chernobyl; Škarnulytė filmed there in an abandoned control room. The python on the switches is not proof that nature is simply reclaiming technology. It is an image that unsettles precisely this reassuring narrative. The panel remains legible as an instrument of human planning; the snake moves across it without fulfilling its original purpose. What once served operation and control now appears as abandoned infrastructure – with a history that does not disappear when operations cease.
Škarnulytė’s works move between documentary and speculative fiction, as the museum also describes them. Therein lies a strength: a real place need not merely serve as evidence for an argument. The film can also open it up as the setting for a possible future. This is neither a prediction nor a scientific explanation. It is a shift in perspective: the human being who once believed they could control everything in the control room becomes a transient part of a longer history of the Earth.
What art can – and cannot – do
Yet this long duration is not merely a poetic idea. It poses a concrete political and technical challenge. The International Atomic Energy Agency notes that people in future generations may take on responsibility for managing disposal facilities. The Swedish company SKB describes safety assessments for a geological repository that consider timescales of up to a million years. Such statements are no guarantee of a carefree future; they show how far planning must extend and how much it depends on institutions, knowledge and reliable procedures.
Here, too, lies an objection to the seductive power of the planetary perspective: anyone depicting humanity as a fleeting moment in cosmic time can easily push those responsible out of the picture. But radioactive legacies are not merely a metaphor for “humanity” in general. They are the result of specific decisions, and keeping them safe requires expertise, funding and sustained action. A film cannot replace this. Nor can it answer detailed technical questions.
For precisely this reason, Škarnulytė’s image should not be read as a solution. Its achievement lies instead in undermining the comfortable division between past technology and the distant future. The snake does not render the control room harmless; it transforms it into a place where absence becomes visible. What happens when the people who design and monitor facilities are long gone? And what forms of responsibility can be passed on at all?
The present as a legacy
“Deep time” – the term for timescales that extend far beyond human lifespans – helps us ask these questions. But it must not become an excuse, as though all human action were meaningless in the face of geological and cosmic dimensions. Conversely, it would be just as convenient to assume that a clever warning could secure the future on its own. Škarnulytė’s exhibition works between these two simplifications: it ties the technological present to planetary scales without turning this into an unequivocal narrative of the future.
This is a limited but important task for art. It can make visible a time that cannot be experienced directly; it can put responsibility into emotional and intellectual perspective. Genuine long-term responsibility requires more than images. Yet without images, the future may remain a number in a report – and the control panel merely an abandoned piece of furniture. Until 8 November 2026, “Arrow of Time” at the Lokremise shows how unsettlingly far the present can reach.
Original reviewed by the editors · 26 October 2026
