Drawing on the tradition of vanitas painting, Giovanfrancesco Giannini, Fabio Novembrini, and Roberta Racis reinterpret its iconography through a contemporary lens, relating it to the overarching crisis of our time.

Set within an imagined Eden, archetypal figures become lost within themselves. Moving through dark and unsettling atmospheres, they mark the inexorable passage of a doomed, dying time. Violence, death, and the transience of life and youth unfold in striking tableaux that emerge from the darkness.

Live video images are interwoven with cut flowers and fruit, candles, and hourglasses—symbols of human finitude and of a reality, and a history, that are themselves perishing. The rhythm through which these still lifes are assembled, displayed, magnified, brought into focus, and ultimately dismantled shapes a katabasis, a descent in which the body becomes merely one object among others.

Anxiety, a crisis of thought, a void of meaning: vanity as the governing law of the world. Yet within this memento mori lies a hymn to life, affirming an inseparable truth: there can be no future without the death of the world as we have known it.