Designed for the “Cabinets of Curiosities” exhibition, The Fifth Season takes up the diorama form in a screen-plasma version that strangely reminds us that museums and advertising share quite similar techniques for staging reality. With this installation, Théo Mercier opens a meteorological window onto an anticipatory landscape deserted by humans and littered with their future archaeological remains. Fascinated by the moment when objects tip over into oblivion or history, into the dustbin or the museum, the artist stages two trompe-l’œil series of works in what almost resembles the degree zero of the plastic continent. The first series, “Pre-hispanic wastes”, created in collaboration with artisans from the Guerrerro region of Mexico, is a series of replicas of everyday wastes in semi-precious stones. Delicately illuminated by a luminous scenario, these tires, cans, bottles and other relics of hyperconsumerism are transfigured by stone, and presented alongside a second series of faux agate slices and enlarged flints, “Whispering stones”. Through an inversion of value and scale, Theo Mercier blurs the boundaries of a particularly ambiguous geological collection, in which the products of “nature” and “culture” achieve the same eternity, and fatally question the fate of human exceptionalism in the face of the world.