How can we imagine the end of our world while we inhabit it? The contemporary art exhibition "8 dawns" that has been enlivening the Baroque village of Noto, Sicily for three years-with the curatorship of Lucia Pietroiusti, curator and Head of Ecologies at Serpentine Galleries in London, and an evocative title, "Sunsets: Cosmogonies and the End of Worlds"-tries to answer this question.

"We learn of the rise and fall of magnificent civilizations, or the wrecks of colonial incursion," says Pietroiusti, who in 2019 won the Golden Lion at the Biennale as curator of the Lithuania Pavilion. "Much is told to us from the silence of those forms of knowledge and world-building that have been erased by time, power or catastrophe. Yet when we experience a world from within, its end can fall outside the realm of the thinkable." 

Promoted by Dimora delle Balze, the video art cycle will enliven the UNESCO World Heritage Sicilian town from July 31 to August 28 with an international selection of videos and artist films that poetically and critically explore themes such as ecology, indigenous cosmologies and the relationships between human and non-human.

Works of speculative videography such as Grosse Fatigue, the dizzying video essay by French artist Camille Henrot that condenses the history of the world into ten minutes and won the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2013, or The Mermaids by Karrabing Film Collective, the experimental film collective formed by indigenous Australian artists and thinkers that uses myth to tell the story of the aftermath of colonialism, help us imagine new consciousnesses that can arise from moments of apparent end. 

The message of the 16 artists involved in Pietroiusti's curatorship is clear: we are witnessing the demise of a Western model that has separated man and nature. As humanity, it is incumbent upon us to recognize this end and try to begin again.  

The titles of the four evenings of screenings as repetitive as a children's chant - "How we ended," "How we began," "How we ended," "How we began" - allude precisely to our possible reinvention. In short, sunset is not to be considered an end, but a passage. After that always comes the dawn.  

Opening image: Alice Bucknell, The Alluvials (final level playthrough), 2024. Courtesy the artist