Overview
Everlasting Worlds
27/3/2025 – 29/06/2025
In a time where planetary anxieties echo through data streams and digital ruins, Everlasting Worlds invites us into a suspended space—somewhere between memory and imagination, extinction and emergence, fossil and fiction. Through the works of Carola Bonfili, Simon Goritschnig, Robertina Šebjanič and Gil Ferrão, this exhibition becomes an immersive excavation into worlds past, future, and parallel. These are not merely imagined environments, but psychological, ecological and mythopoetic ecosystems shaped by the interplay of analog and digital gestures. Each artist, in their own way, engages in world-building—not as escapism, but as a method of storytelling, a practice of critique, and an archaeology of what was, what is, and what could be.
Carola Bonfili explores speculative territories through computer-generated imagery, algorithmic storytelling, and sculptural textures. In The Flute Singing, a humanoid figure walks backward through a barren quarry-like environment—a space seemingly scarred by extractive processes, human or otherwise. We never see its face, only a moving pattern on its cape, resembling both lungs and Rorschach blots—a breathing archive of ambiguity. The narration, generated by artificial intelligence, contemplates existence with a melancholic nostalgia. The creature traverses a carved landscape that might be Earth, or a distant planet shaped by another species. Bonfili draws on the mythological narratives of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, reworking them through the generative logic of artificial intelligence. The resulting text becomes a new kind of metamorphosis—crafted by code, set in a speculative future, and echoing a civilization long gone. In The Stone Monkey, Bonfili takes us to another abandoned place: a half-submerged fishing village in decay, overtaken by nature and spectral architecture. A little further on, deep within the surrounding jungle, we encounter a monumental mirrored structure—part spaceship, part shrine. A humanoid monkey—perhaps an astronaut, perhaps an evolved species—begins to petrify. As the creature contemplates its transformation, strange mechanical insect forms begin to rotate and rise—perhaps the seeds of a new lifeform, echoing Flaubert’s vision of microscopic origins. Inspired by Gustave Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony, Bonfili infuses the narrative with hallucinatory sequences that blur the line between relic and prophecy. Her accompanying PBR (Physically Based Rendering) sculptures recall archaeological fragments—textural studies of stone, metal, and lost iconography—as if excavated from a digital tomb.
Simon Goritschnig mirrors these concerns through a practice situated at the intersection of drawing, sculpture, and speculative anthropology. His series Excavations from Unknown Origins offers graphite rubbings of imaginary artefacts: cross-sections of unknown life forms, fossilized mutations, alien anatomies. The aesthetic draws from both prehistoric cave art and scientific diagrams, suggesting a fictional evolution beyond the human. His Alien Artefacts, printed in biodegradable filament, evoke biological relics from post-human futures: mollusk-like exoskeletons, hybrid organisms, or synthetic fossils. Goritschnig reflects on the collapse of the Earth and the ambiguous hope of space colonization. His artistic language does not separate the analog from the digital, the ancient from the futuristic; rather, it insists that cave painting and VR are part of the same continuum. He is, like Bonfili, working through an archaeology of the future—a reflection of our age in which the spiritual, the speculative, and the scientific interlace.
Robertina Šebjanič grounds these fictions in scientific inquiry and environmental urgency. Her work Echinoidea Future – Adriatic Sensing stems from in-vitro experiments with sea urchins, organisms deeply affected by anthropogenic pollution and oxygen depletion in the Adriatic Sea. Collaborating with marine scientists, she monitored the embryonic development of these creatures when exposed to common pollutants like soap and cooking oil—substances abundantly present in coastal tourist zones. The resulting glass sculptures give tangible form to microscopic trauma, while AI-generated visuals from decades of environmental data trace the changing biochemistry of the sea. Šebjanič’s concept of the “Aquatocene” captures a new epoch defined by liquid transformations, where hydrological cycles and human activity are inseparable. Her installations conjure empathy not through spectacle, but through sonic immersion, data aesthetics, and poetic resonance. She brings us into a proto-immersive state, where science, myth and sensory experience coalesce.
While Bonfili and Goritschnig gesture toward civilizations that may have vanished or never existed, and Šebjanič confronts the collapse in slow motion, Gil Ferrão offers a more tactile, performative counterpoint. His work operates in miniature, inviting viewers to engage with playful, ambiguous objects sealed in jars. These assemblages resemble alien devices, toy machines, or micro-worlds, stripped to their essential forms and colored in bold primary hues. Ferrão’s practice is grounded in physical interaction—he imagines sculpture not as static form, but as shared encounter. Play becomes a tool for connection, speculation, and co-creation. Here, abstraction is not distance but invitation: a call to reimagine what things are for, who uses them, and how meaning is generated collectively.
Taken together, the works in Everlasting Worlds form an entangled landscape of fragments and futures. They propose ruins as thresholds, not endpoints. They ask us to consider what endures beyond us—not only in matter, but in myth, code, memory, and mutation. These worlds are not everlasting because they are immutable, but because they regenerate, evolve, and reconfigure in response to disappearance.
To navigate this exhibition is to become an explorer of temporal rifts and speculative timelines. It is to stand inside the dream of a future past, to decipher artefacts whose meanings shift with each observer. It is to feel the resonance between analog texture and digital shimmer, between the extinct and the emergent, the lost and the imagined. The worlds we enter here are not behind us, nor ahead of us. They are suspended in the now—a now shaped by crisis, curiosity, and the enduring impulse to create meaning from what remains.
In this planetary moment, Everlasting Worlds does not offer solutions. It offers portals. And through them, a plurality of perspectives on what it means to build, to lose, and to wonder.
Essay by Marie du Chastel
Curated by Manuel S.Mendonça & Diogo Gonçalves