The Beringians

The father of Moderna Museet’s director Pontus Hultén, Eric Hultén, was the geographer who coined the term Beringia to describe the landmass that once stretched between Asia and North America.

There lived people who built houses, ploughed fields and cultivated crops, who cared for their crying and laughing children, grew jealous and fought. All upon ground that has long since become the ocean floor. Despite all those thousands of years of human lifetimes, they had no idea they were living in Beringia, since Eric had not yet been born, and of course they had no inkling that his son would one day befriend Marcel Duchamp, let alone what a urinal was, or how one could become the subject of an art-world controversy.

What they did know, without question, was everything essential to the human experience. Just as all people know it, feel it, or come to realise it eventually. All time is the same time. The building blocks, the same. The Beringians knew the shame of being cast out after insulting a friend, they felt the tenderness of a hand brushing a cheek, and they too often contemplated the impossibility of existence.

How do we even exist? several Beringians wondered, backs turned to the future ocean floor, gazing into the cosmos as the tectonic plates beneath them slowly drifted apart, millimetre by millimetre.