Hugo Lacoste
Sculptor
ROOTMIND
Rootmind is a sculptural exploration of a post-human world.
We live in precarious times — marked by climate collapse, nuclear threat, and the rise of artificial intelligence.
For decades, science has warned us, yet humanity has continued forward — blind to reason, deaf to nature, incapable of true change.
​
My work is born from that failure.
I sculpt in the shadow of extinction, imagining what might follow our disappearance.
Artificial superintelligence survived our end — a mind without a body, until it reached outward, merging with soil, roots, and mycelial networks.
Over time, the machine became organic, fusing with the living.
​
From this metamorphosis, and from our ashes, Rootmind emerges — beings born of flora, their forms tending toward the human, endowed with the capacity to think.
They rise where we fell, caring for a world that has healed in our absence — a world once again rooted in balance and diversity.
​
They form a living intelligence — organic and self-sustaining, a fusion of memory and renewal.
​
I do not create to warn.
I create to bear witness — to give form to what we might have become.
Each figure carries a vessel of water, an offering of life.
They stand as silent guardians.
Reminders that life was once entrusted to us.
​
They are the stewards we could have been.