The Castle in Bytow (which houses the West Kashubian Museum), located in northern Poland, exhibits such cultural relics as a knight’s suit of armor from 600 years ago, which can take the visitor’s imagination back to that period. Utilizing the time-traveling magic of the Castle, Maruyama showed an installation there based on the idea of “viewing the 20th-century relics 600 years in the future.”
Inside the tower of the Castle, she arranged pieces of fabric solidified with resin in the form of a DNA spiral of a 20th-century human. On the surfaces of those pieces were a variety of photographic images of conflicts, including example of ethnic strife. The work seemed to be saying that at the root of such conflicts is a gene inherent in humankind and engraved in our DNA; hence, these tragedies were inevitably destined to occur.
If humans were to still exist 600 years in the future, how would they view Maruyama’s DNA spiral in the Castle? Nobody can be certain whether future humans are destined to have that same gene as we have today.