Sometimes a little accident is just enough. One hesitation too many, one thought that holds us back a little longer than usual. Sometimes, on the contrary, everything flows too smoothly and we slip too easily into where we were supposed to arrive. In both cases, we’ve missed the moment; arriving too early or too late, we’ve confused the course of events. Suddenly, then, destiny stumbles: everything happens in a way no one could have imagined. Roles become blurred, and the characters in our lives exchange masks, events pile up one on top of the other. We are lost in time, as if in a foreign city.

Théo Mercier extends this common everyday experience to the whole world. Now it’s our planet that seems to have missed the rendezvous with its own history and destiny. The consequences are impressive. Antiquity and the contemporary exchange places, when one tries to take power over the other, to abuse it, to hold it hostage. But a planet where everything keeps missing its time also triggers a kind of cosmic turmoil. While things try to free themselves from the human empire, cars crash to the ground like birds struck by lightning, and stones fall on the city. In this minuet of plagues befalling the Earth, a new ritual of liberation might be hidden. What we are experiencing is not the time of the end: it’s also the moment when past and future lose themselves in each other and try to invent a new world.

Emanuele Coccia