In The Thrill is gone, Théo Mercier proposes a critical and disenchanted point of view about History as the narrative principal of a series of sculptures perilously teetering at the crossroads of assertions of identity and political claims. What if, in the near future, the African continent demanded a pioneering place in the books of modern art history, conceived well before Derain, Picasso or Braque drew inspiration from them? If art history is the victorious fiction that shapes collective memory, aren’t museums the battlefields of this ideological war? Staging the scene of a museum “at war,” the artist reveals the fictional aspect of institutions and the power they have to program the conservation or obsolescence of objects and works of art.