The exhibition unfolds in the large hall on the first floor of the Palazzo Esposizioni and in the three rooms adjacent to it. In the large hall, Le Monde Avant la Création de l’Homme, a work fully 21 metres long, is set in an immersive installation entitled The Wonderful Last Minute that recreates the atmosphere of a primeval forest. Inside it, visitors can wander around amid testimonials of ancient history conjured up by circular works entitled De Hortus.
The exhibition moves on to explore the earliest traces left by mankind, revisited in the shape of five large pictures from the artist’s Anthropocene Prehistory cycle.
Visitors are then invited to embrace the awareness of time by immersing themselves in a video installation entitled The Planetary Garden, realized in collaboration with Noruwei, in which prehistory, the present and the future are all linked in a single stratified horizon.
The exhibition winds up with a reflection on Rome, viewed and broken down into its various historical and geological phases – a visual palimpsest created expressly for Palazzo Esposizioni, bringing together millennia of evolution under a single gaze.
In the words of exhibition curator Sébastien Delot, “the capability of human thought” lies in “suddenly bringing to the surface of consciousness a knowlege that appeared to have plummeted into a bottomless pit”.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue edited by Sébastien Delot, with essays by the curator, by Guido Rebecchini, by Rebecca Wragg Sykes and by Sofia Di Gravio.