As Stones on Their Palms, Embers and Flame

For the exhibition As Stones on Their Palms, Embers and Flame, forty five degrees was commissioned to develop the exhibition design. The show explores the entanglement of ruination with histories of anticolonial resistance, uprising, revolution, and political radicalism across the Mediterranean. Curated by Chiara Cartuccia, these tensions are composed in the exhibition through the resonant vocabularies of four artists: Marianne Fahmy, Joyce Joumaa, Huda Takriti, and Hasan Özgür Top.

Ruins are not understood here as inert remnants of the past, but as charged terrains where capitulation and endurance meet. In fact, the ruins in ruination are not only the decayed material left by events of destruction but also, and more crucially, the affects that continue to reverberate in their aftermath.

By way of a careful review of the selected artists’ works we recognise a common thread running through their practices. Their use of a clear language of overlay and blending often gives rise to what they collectively seek to convey: the ruin as a complex synthesis of time, superimposed rather than linear, a state of being that is embedded rather than abstract.

The exhibition design echoes this gesture, creating a layered spatial layout. Its primary intention is to respond to the profound sense of time, to the experiences, stories and legacies that each artwork crystallises. Thus, the works are conceived as embedded within the space; they exist in relation to one another.

By expanding the means and efforts of the exhibitions’ material cycles, we engaged with La Fabra Centre d’Art Contemporani in a process to develop infrastructural exhibition elements tailored to the institution’s evolving needs. Conceived as a long-term design collaboration rather than a single-use intervention, the commission focused on creating a catalogue of elements that could be repurposed and reused in future exhibitions and public programs.