The Centre
Cannot Hold



—exhibition
—RADIUS
—Delft
—2026
—text
—web

[Installation shot at RADIUS, NL, 2026]


Curator: sergi rusca
Text: sergi rusca
Translation: mirjam lins chooten
Campaign Image & Graphic Design: via minhu
Technical Design and Implementation: menno verhoef
Audiovisual Design and Implementation: sbartexpertise
General Technical Support: bergmal , martina farrugia
mendel maurits, david tiemstra.
RADIUS TEAM
Intern Assistant Curator: maria goncalves balz
Office Manager, Administrator, & Host Coordinator: magnelette
Project Manager Production: sophie huijbregts
Project Manager Education: andrea koll
Director and Curator: niekolaas lekkerkerk
Curator: sergi rusca
Junior Programme Maker: Bobbi jelgerhuis Swildens
Project Manager Communication & Public Programme: daan veerman
This exhibition has been made possible with the support of
the @mondriaanfonds @spainculturenl @aecid_es and @acecultura

The Centre Cannot Hold navigates a fractured geography shaped by extraction, where oil operates as both substance and narrative force. Filmed across sites extending from Los Angeles to the Persian Gulf, the work unfolds within landscapes where deep time, geopolitics and myth converge.

Blending documentary strategies with speculative fiction and contemporary archaeology, the film approaches oil as a living archive: a material condensation of organic life, historical violence and planetary transformation. What is extracted is never neutral; it carries within it the temporal weight of the Earth itself.

The film resists linear narration, unfolding instead through a shifting constellation of images and temporalities. Past and future, surface and subsurface, presence and residue begin to overlap. In this unstable terrain, extraction becomes inseparable from the production of meaning, revealing a world in which the ground itself participates in history.

The Centre Cannot Hold is a telluric meditation on what Reza Negarestani —whose book Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (2008) has greatly inspired the film—, calls ungrounding: the process of degenerating a solid body 
—the Earth—, by corrupting the coherency of its surfaces —oil drilling. From desert geologies to hyper-urban infrastructures, oil emerges as a nonhuman agent linking planetary histories of transformation, collapse and persistence.


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