Chronotopes – Artifacts from Fictional Time-Spaces

Chronotopes brings together the work of Simone Pellegrini, Aniana Heras, and the Forlenza jewellery atelier in a setting that blurs the line between contemporary art exhibition and archaeological museum. The display evokes vitrines, relics, and ceremonial stillness, yet what we encounter are not remnants of a known past, but objects from speculative time-spaces—chronotopes in the Bakhtinian sense: narrative zones where time and space coalesce into mythic and imaginative forms.
Each artist contributes to this fictional archaeology through a language that fuses the material and the symbolic.
Simone Pellegrini creates painterly monotypes that resemble maps of lost territories, altars, or ritual diagrams. His technique is rigorous and self-contained: carved matrices used only once and then destroyed, yielding singular, unrepeatable works. The result is a body of images that feels unearthed, inscribed with echoes of ancient cosmogonies, pagan rites, and collective memory.
Aniana Heras operates in the realm of clay, working from elemental vessels—bowls, jars, bottles—that serve as the foundation for improvisational sculptural acts. Her pieces are tactile investigations of instability, equilibrium, and transformation, where raw terracotta and volatile glazes challenge the boundaries between utility and ceremony, tradition and experimentation. Each work becomes a fragment of a lived yet unknowable culture.
Forlenza, a Roman family atelier active since 1960, presents jewellery as miniature mythologies. With deep roots in classical aesthetics and informed by studies in archaeology, art history, and design, Michele and Alessandro Forlenza create pieces that blend the elegance of antiquity with the energy of contemporary culture. Their jewellery appears as intimate reliquaries—evocative, baroque, at times even funerary—each marked with the historic Roma 207 stamp, suggesting provenance from a world half-remembered, half-invented.
Together, these three practices do not recreate the past, but fabricate temporal fictions.
In Chronotopes, art becomes artefact, the gallery a museum of never-was. We are invited to wander through imagined ruins, where time folds, symbols accumulate, and the present masquerades as the ancient.