Eighty tonnes of sand and junk: why Mona’s latest exhibition is destined to collapse in front of our eyes

‘We are building our own destruction,’ says French artist Théo Mercier of his new sand-sculpted work Mirrorscape, on display at Mona in Hobart, Tasmania. Photograph: Mona/Jesse Hunniford/Image courtesy of the artist and the Museum of Old and New Art

Théo Mercier, the French visual artist, choreographer and stage director, has spent months in Tasmania taking photos of junk.

In Mirrorscape, an exhibition that opened on the weekend at Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art (Mona), he and an international team of expert sculptors – Kevin Crawford, Enguerrand David, Sue McGrew and Leonardo Ugolini – used 80 tonnes of compacted sand to recreate the scenes of decay and detritus he found, serving them as a mirror of our own ruin. It’s a ghostly scene of domestic, environmental and industrial decay in still life, and it’s beautiful.