The End of the World

On the occasion of its reopening, the Luigi Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art presents the exhibition The End of the World, curated by director Fabio Cavallucci with the cooperation of (as well as that of the internal team) a large group of international advisors including: Elena Agudio, Antonia Alampi, Luca Barni, Myriam Ben Salah, Marco Brizzi, Lorenzo Bruni, Jota Castro, Wlodek Goldkorn, Katia Krupennikova, Morad Montazami, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Giulia Poli, Luisa Santacesaria, Monika Szewczyk and Pier Luigi Tazzi.

“The title The End of the World comes from the idea that which we have known up to now has become obsolete,” says Fabio Cavallucci, director of the Pecci Centre, “the exhibition is not, therefore, indicative of an impending catastrophic future but rather of the awareness of the prevailing uncertainty of our world and a reflection on scenarios which surround us. The means (also conceptually) of interpretation of reality which we once knew are no longer sufficient in comprehending our current time. Hence, from this structural change, there comes a widespread sense of the end.”

Including the works of over 50 international artists in an exhibition which will extend over the entire museum display area of over 3000 square-metres, the exhibition display—designed by Scandurra Studio—is set up as a kind of exercise of distance which pushes us to take a look at our present from far away. Once inside the spectators will experience a feeling of being projected a few thousand light years away from the present to review our world as if it were a fossil, geological eras from our current time, forcing us to view the world from afar and to think about the immeasurable cosmic distances and the interminable ages of the Earth and the Universe, in face of which our lives seem like insubstantial fragments. The world which we have known, from the origin of humanity up to today, our world, will appear to us as having already ended. This will create the sensation of being suspended between a now distant past and a still distant future. The End of the World is set in this limbo and through various works which are to be physically experienced in an alternation of space and sound, we will be dragged in a continuous movement, inescapable, a kind of loop of eternal return which brings us both further away and closer to the present, offering us new interpretations.

The End of the World will also be accompanied by a series of conferences and debates which will develop the various themes explored in the exhibition and will include scientific, philosophical and literary aspects, from more recent theories of physics to the prehistoric, and from science fiction to ecology and sustainability. The first guest will be the anthropologist Marc Augé who will hold a lecture on October 16 at 6pm. After, at 9pm there wil be a performance by Dewey Dell and Massimo Pupillo, entitled Third Vertical Transmission.

Artists: Adel Abdessemed, Jananne Al-Ani, Darren Almond, Giovanna Amoroso & Istvan Zimmermann, Aristide Antonas, Riccardo Arena, Kader Attia, Francis Bacon, Babi Badalov, Fayçal Baghriche, Francesco Bertelè, Rossella Biscotti, Björk, Umberto Boccioni, Kerstin Brätsch, Cai Guo-Qiang, Julian Charrière & Julius von Bismark, Ali Cherri, Analivia Cordeiro, Isabelle Cornaro, Vincenzo Maria Coronelli, Hanne Darboven, Pippo Delbono, Marcel Duchamp, Marlene Dumas, Jimmie Durham, Olafur Eliasson, Federico Fellini, Didier Fiuza Faustino, Lucio Fontana, Carlos Garaicoa, Adalberto Giazotto, Arash Hanaei, Camille Henrot, Thomas Hirschhorn, Joakim, Polina Kanis, Tadeusz Kantor, Tigran Khachatryan, Robert Kusmirowski, Andrey Kuzkin, Volodymyr Kuznetsov, Suzanne Lacy, Ahmed Mater, Boris Mikhailov, NASA, Henrique Oliveira, Lydia Ourahmane, Pëtr Pavlensky, Gianni Pettena, Agnieszka Polska, Pablo Picasso, Pussy Riot / Taisiya Krugovykh, Qiu Zhijie, Józef Robakowski, Batoul S’Himi, Fari Shams, Santiago Sierra, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Unknown - Lower Paleolithic Period, Unknown - Upper Paleolithic Period, Luis Urculo, Emmanuel Van der Auwera, Ekaterina Vasilyeva & Anna Zubkova, Andy Warhol, Ingrid Wildi Merino, Andrzej Wróblewski, Alik Yakubovich, David Zink Yi

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