Chronotopes is not merely an exhibition, but the archaeological display of an imagined culture—a fictive civilization composed through the encounter of three distinct artistic practices. The presentation echoes the atmosphere of a museum: vitrines, relics, ceremonial arrangements. Yet the objects on view are not remnants of any known past, but artifacts from speculative worlds—chronotopes in the Bakhtinian sense, where space and meaning converge into mythic, non-linear imaginaries.

Conceived by the curator as a fictional yet coherent cultural narrative, the exhibition brings together three artists who have never worked together before: Simone Pellegrini, whose drawings suggest esoteric cartographies and ancient scripts; Aniana Heras, whose ceramics resemble ritual vessels or devotional fragments; and Forlenza, whose high jewellery evokes the refined treasures of lost dynasties. Through this unlikely constellation, Chronotopia proposes a symbolic system untethered from historical time—a poetic anthropology unfolding in a space where invention stands in for memory, and mystery takes the place of provenance.

At the heart of the exhibition stands the work of Simone Pellegrini, whose monumental drawings do not present themselves as images but as surfaces of thought—excavations of interior worlds, sedimented with time and text. His compositions resist the clean demarcations of genre, emerging instead from a space between writing and drawing, control and surrender. Through a laborious process involving the construction of his own surfaces and the indirect application of pigment via matrices and transfers, Pellegrini cultivates a visual language that is as much about concealment as it is about revelation. The result is a kind of palimpsest—a layered field in which fragments accumulate without ever crystallizing into a whole.

Pellegrini’s practice is animated by a radical philosophical inquiry. The walls of his studio bear the traces of a continuous intellectual dialogue—with Deleuze, Spinoza, Agamben, Bonnefoy, among others. Yet this constellation of thinkers does not form a system; it forms a tension. His work is born at the limit of language, in that fraught space where words “tire” and the image steps in—not to illustrate thought, but to provoke it. In this sense, his drawings function as propositions rather than representations, questioning the very conditions under which meaning emerges and dissolves.

If Pellegrini’s works evoke the ghost of a civilization that never existed—one composed of glyphs, maps, and ritual diagrams—then the ceramics of Aniana Heras seem to belong to its domestic and symbolic rituals. Heras’s practice revolves around the vase—a form she explores and deconstructs until it becomes something else entirely: a vessel that resists function, often sealed or inaccessible, echoing more the idea of containment than its use. Her forms originate from a traditional vase typical of her native region, one with deep feminine connotations, which she has reimagined through a personal and fantastical vocabulary. The result is a body of work that resonates with ritual and myth, yet remains deeply idiosyncratic—objects that feel both archetypal and entirely new.

Her approach reactivates the idea of the votive, the object charged with intention, longing, or offering. These ceramics do not perform; they emanate. Their textures, cracks, and glazes are less aesthetic decisions than consequences of their becoming. As such, they speak to a temporality that is cyclical and porous, resonating with the earth from which they are drawn and to which they inevitably return.

The presence of Forlenza introduces a further axis of resonance: the jewel. These are not sculptural adornments, but authentic high jewellery—unique pieces that represent the pinnacle of Italian craftsmanship. By including jewels within the exhibition, Chronotopia deliberately echoes the museological displays of archaeological collections, where jewellery plays a fundamental role in evoking the social, spiritual, and material cultures of past civilizations.

Forlenza’s pieces, meticulously crafted and symbolically rich, function not only as exquisite adornments but as cultural artefacts—objects that carry with them traces of memory, myth, and ritual. Their elegance is never superficial; it is embedded in form, intention, and tradition. They recall ceremonial ornaments and ancestral treasures, lending the exhibition a further dimension of intimacy and corporeality. In being meant to be worn—close to the skin—they draw the viewer into a more immediate, embodied relationship with the themes of the show.

Rather than interrupting the poetic archaeology proposed by Pellegrini and Heras, Forlenza’s presence intensifies it. The jewels ground the speculative in the precious, the abstract in the tangible. They remind us that every civilization—real or imagined—tells its story not only through images and objects, but through what it chooses to carry on the body.

What unites these three practices is a shared refusal of closure. Chronotopes is a space of echoes, rather than declarations. It draws inspiration from the museological, but subverts its fixity: instead of cataloging objects, it animates them; instead of affirming chronology, it fractures it. The gallery becomes a liminal zone, a cabinet of speculative relics, a theatre of memory without origin.

In this choreography of surfaces and textures, fragments and symbols, the viewer is invited not to decode, but to dwell—to move through the space as one would through a dream or an unfamiliar landscape. Meaning here is fugitive, contingent, relational. And in this very fugitivity lies the radical proposition of Chronotopes: that art, at its most potent, does not reflect the world, but reconfigures the terms by which we perceive it.