Inspired by theories that predict or attempt to describe the arrival of a new Dark Age for our civilisation, this show situates the Middle Ages as a space-time that is both the origin and the destiny of the present moment. Using social, cultural and aesthetic analogies, the various works link the Middle Ages to the present, as a period of transition, a time marked by a sense of the end of a cycle and impending catastrophe, but also as a time of opportunity for the development of new models.
The Middle Ages preserved the heritage of the past at will. Not through cultural cryogenisation, but through translation and self-interested use: it was an immense bricolage operation balanced between despair, nostalgia and hope. As a result of a similar process, these works are hybrid objects. They combine and reinterpret media such as codex, fresco painting or stone carving, and are made with new materials that imitate older ones in form and finish.
At the level of visual narrative, we recognise characteristic elements of the Middle Ages as commonplace in the collective imagination, but the ensemble of historical clichés is presented to us altered by anachronisms and distortions of various kinds. By applying a speculative filter to the fictions depicted, the imagined future becomes intertwined with alternative versions of the medieval period. A series of events are postulated as points of divergence in order to outline a series of uchronic Middle Ages, timelines abandoned centuries ago but which may sooner or later reappear on the horizon.
