The Ediacaran Swimmers is a new work within artist Anicka Yi’s ongoing series of Winogradsky-based artworks, first debuted at the Venice Biennale in 2019. In this monumental lightbox, Yi fuses microbial processes with technological and urban ecologies, combining imagery from a living Winogradsky culture in her New York studio with a machine-learning model trained on earlier works in the series. The result is a composition that blurs the boundaries between organic and synthetic systems.

The work draws from microbiologist Sergei Winogradsky’s early 20th-century columns, miniature ecosystems that revealed the hidden complexity of microbial communities in soil. Here Yi reimagines these forms as speculative artifacts of hybrid futures, where biological and technological systems evolve together in continually transforming landscapes. Its palette of iron-rich ambers and steely greys evokes the residues of London’s industrial sediment, while warm ochres suggest the mineral traces of microbial metabolic activity. Geometric acrylic overlays with biomorphic cutouts conjure the duality of circuit boards and unicellular organisms, while glass vessels filled with earthy green resin evoke incubators of nascent life. London—and cities more broadly—are thus situated within a continuum where soil functions as both archive and living system.

The title recalls the Ediacaran period, when multicellular animal life first emerged from microbial worlds, linking Yi’s biomorphic forms to deep time and the earliest ecologies of Earth.

Commissioned by 1 Triton Square by British Land and Royal London Asset Management.