这组作品凝聚了我对于2025年及其之后人类世界伦理的思考，它犹如一份永远无法厘清死因的考古报告，是一场“不可能的未来考古”。死亡与坍塌已将人性剥离得面目全非。我希望用七个章节（七篇日记组成的apocallapse，隐喻着“上帝创世七日”）去提醒人们去设想，第八天将会发生什么？这种站在终点之后，试图重新书写“起点”的不可能性，或许能将人们召唤回当下。去凝视吧，那些正在坍塌的断壁残垣；尝试着修复，尝试着纠正吧。不要与堕落的力量共舞，即便在废墟与灰烬中劳作无比艰难——就如同我每日置身于工作室的生活一般。即便，这很可能是徒劳无功的。
Lorsque le « Dieu du Nouveau Monde » pénètre dans l'ancien, un postulat est déjà établi : la frontière entre l'ancien et le nouveau est marquée par l'extinction des espèces. C’est comme quelqu’un qui entre soudain dans une pièce et découvre un cadavre : le deuil commence, les questions surgissent, et tout se met à graviter autour de la mort, ce signifiant-maître absolu.
Cette série d’œuvres porte mes réflexions éthiques sur l’humanité de 2025 et au-delà. Une « archéologie future impossible » — un rapport sans cause de décès identifiable. La mort et l’effondrement ont défiguré l’humain. J’espère, à travers sept chapitres (sept journaux formant un apocallapse, en écho aux « sept jours de la Création »), inviter chacun à imaginer : que se passe-t-il le huitième jour ? Cette tentative d’écrire un « commencement » après la fin, aussi impossible soit-elle, pourrait peut-être nous ramener à l’instant présent. Regardez — les ruines qui s’écroulent. Essayez de réparer. Essayez de corriger. Ne dansez pas avec les forces de la déchéance, même si travailler dans les cendres est exténuant — tout comme ma vie quotidienne dans l’atelier.
Même si cela est très probablement vain.
When the “God of the New World” steps into the old one, a premise has already been assumed — that the boundary between new and old is marked by the event of species extinction. It is like someone suddenly entering a room and finding a body; mourning begins, questions arise, and everything starts to orbit around death, the ultimate master signifier.
This series of works carries my ethical reflections on humanity in 2025 and beyond. It is an “impossible future archaeology” — a report of death with no clear cause. Collapse and demise have rendered the human essence unrecognizable. I hope to awaken people through seven chapters (seven diary entries forming an apocallapse, echoing the concept of the “seven days of creation”) and ask: what happens on the eighth day? This impossible writing from a “beginning” that comes after the end may call us back to the present. Look — at the crumbling ruins. Try to mend them. Try to set things right. Do not dance with the forces of decay, even if laboring in the ashes is exhausting — as exhausting as my daily life in the studio.
Even if it is most likely in vain.
“Apocallapse” is the third part of the series “Black Hole of Knowledge” by Jier JIANG.
The title is a portmanteau of “apocalypse” and “collapse”, referring to the very impossibility of writing a new revelation after the total collapse of civilization — the structure of possibility itself has already failed. The work envisions a catastrophic scenario: after the extinction of human civilization, a mysterious entity from another part of the universe arrives on Earth and begins an archaeological excavation from a non-human perspective. The viewer is placed in a paradoxical position — that of a “god of the new world,” though this position is, in truth, unsustainable.Each piece appears as a failed device: a broken time machine, an interrupted linguistic system, an unfinished archival mechanism. The artist offers no answers, but instead poses an unavoidable question:
Why did human civilization collapse?
Apocallapse, Diary 01
Interactive installation, sculpture
Clock, butterfly specimen, glass, wood, serpentine, alabaster, A4 paper. (Printed content © CIA)
"Based on my exploration of human history, the object displayed here could well be a failed time machine. The reason is simple: their scientists had a habit of conducting experiments on animals and insects. Yet each butterfly here embodies death at every moment — and one of them even entered the machine itself, trapped by its meticulous order. I reach out, stirring through these ruins, wondering whether the flap of a butterfly's wings could trigger a nuclear explosion. Could the desire to manipulate corpses and destroy life be the ultimate cause of humanity's self-destruction?
Indeed, my journey aims precisely to exhume what remains unspeakable in this lost civilization. According to the archives, their archaeologists and linguists — until the very end — refused to acknowledge the linguistic legitimacy of the seven symbols unearthed at the Sanxingdui site in China. As a result, this even more ancient 'civilization' remained, for them, an unpassable black hole — and they perished carrying this unresolved enigma with them.
Now, beneath a stone engraved with the only seven symbols of Sanxingdui, lies a pile of regularly declassified CIA documents. Here, impossible writings intersect with a revealed 'truth'. These documents recount humanity’s attempts to perceive distant spaces remotely and to transcend the boundaries of consciousness and temporality — thus revealing obscured truths: they may well have served as reference material in the construction of their time machine. My research report might as well be titled: Apoca...llapse... According to psychoanalytic theory, a slip of the tongue signals the intrusion of the Real. Could it be that I, too, have an unconscious? The name fits perfectly — after all, there will never be a new world again."
Apocallapse, Diary 2
Interactive installation, sculpture, shou sugi ban, video,
Burnt clock casing, alabaster, photo print on acrylic, light bulbs, photo print on transparent film, Arduino
“A museum display case? Or the empty shell of a clock? Both forms collapse into a third:
a tomb. Time has stopped here. On it rests a neo-Assyrian stele. At first, I mistook it for Sumerian — a point of origin for language, forgotten before it was even understood. Yet it is there that history was built, where technique began to calculate, where war became conceivable. With hindsight, I wonder: isn’t this the same error human archaeologists make? We reconstruct civilizations from fragments, without knowing whether what we piece together is true. Understanding may only be a delayed misunderstanding — a forced reading through languages that are too recent.
A hole in the carcass draws my gaze. What glimmers is an archival image: a mineral specimen fused with a supernova. When I fix my eyes on it, a mechanism is triggered. To the left, a stele embedded with blue mineral powder lights up; a voice attempts to justify the collapse through scientific discourse. The words sound like a final defense of disaster. Then the red stele lights up on the right. The tone changes — icy, fragmented, brutal. No explanation — only exposure. Harsh truths pierce through a broken language.
This red/blue binary perhaps refers to a core narrative myth of the human network: The Matrix, with its illusion of choice.
There is no free will. If I hear one voice rather than the other, it’s because a random algorithm decided which light and sound to activate. Even I cannot escape it.
These branches — a final ritual for some deity? Covered in alabaster powder, they seem to fossilize slowly over time. Does the rotting wood still deserve preservation through the Japanese technique of shou sugi ban? Does a civilization that has already ended still need to be saved?
My gaze returns to the sculpted hand. It seems to raise a mysterious object — as if to rescue something from the wreck. This gesture reminds me of Noah’s Ark: an act of stubborn salvation, already hopeless. Then my eyes fall on the obsidian sphere. It says nothing. But it seems to know everything.
Apocallapse Diary 03
intallation
“This pendulum may be a detached fragment from the same ensemble as the two time machines I discovered two days ago. It sinks into an electronic screen, similar to those “black mirrors” once obsessively gazed upon by humanity.
Before the collapse of their civilization, humans stared endlessly into such devices. Their own image, as well as that of the world, was reflected on this smooth surface. But what the screen showed was merely a reflection of reality — a simulacrum of a simulacrum. Now, the mirror is shattered, the layers of illusion have collapsed, and the internal components lie exposed. I suppose that before their disappearance, humans had become lost in an obsession with information. Through omnipresent screens, they immersed themselves in a flood of images and signs, wandering in a labyrinth of data until they lost all sense of real time.
This black mirror was no doubt a relic of that frenzy: once, it glowed, saturated with messages, capturing millions of gazes.
As for the pendulum inserted into the screen, I believe it was a desperate attempt to repair the broken chronology using a “time pendulum.” A symbol of ancient clockwork mechanisms, its steady oscillation embodied the rhythm of time.
Perhaps, in the end, a programmer planted it there, hoping to awaken time frozen in place with a familiar cadence.
The experiment failed. The pendulum is motionless. The pulse of time does not return. But the shards of liquid crystal still gleam with a mineral light.
However advanced it may have been, human civilization could not hold onto time. The beating of clocks stopped here, while duration — immeasurable — continues to flow in silence. Despite the precision of their theories, it seems that in the end, Bergson defeated Einstein.
At the heart of the black hole? There is only void.
One minute before the Black Hole
sculpture,
limestone
The Gregorian calendar is now universally applied. However, when you open the calendar on a phone, you find that the days from October 5 to October 14, 1582, are nonexistent. Astronomical observation software, based on scientific data, allows us to see simulated images of the universe at any moment in the past. However, when you try to set the time to October 5, 1582, at 00:00, the system and the image of the universe automatically jump to 00:00 on October 15. It can be understood that the calendar is merely a representation of the notion of time, while astronomy is its foundation. In this sense, these "ten days" also seem to be excluded by the realm of astronomy. These "ten days" have left no memory, no history, no birth, no death. The artist places commemorative monuments engraved with these ten dates on the ground, resembling almost tombstones, according to the angles of rotation of the ten planets of the solar system, from the Sun to Pluto, at 23:59 on October 4, 1582.
The image of the universe at 23:59 on October 4, 1582, thus transforms into an exhibition space. The next minute, all representations of time become obsolete. Limestone itself is a fossil — the remains of marine organisms. The artist uses this proof of death to write the impossibility of death, by raising a monument to a period of "nonexistent" time, gently touching on the mystery of the truth of time. Looking up at the wall of the exhibition space, you will discover aligned engravings of years and names, the "real" time and the "real" names, echoing with the ghostly and "nonexistent" ten days.
The Hole of the 'Lunar Seas', Part I: Museum
installation,
glass boxes, stainless steel
The reason why the "seas" of the Moon are named as such is that early observers, seeing the dark regions of the lunar surface, supposed they were seas. This misnomer, based on perception and intuition, has persisted. On Earth, many prehistoric marine organisms have existed and disappeared. Their remnants are preserved as specimens in natural history museums. The artist created glass boxes simulating these display cases, stacked to form columns about 1.8 meters high, establishing an "up and down" relationship with the vaults of the exhibition space. Between the boxes, pseudo-scientific labels are inserted, consisting of three types of names: those given to terrestrial marine organisms, those of the nonexistent lunar "seas," and those discovered in 1582 (the year missing ten days in the universal calendar).
The glass boxes are designed to preserve and display the "knowable objects," just as the museum relies on scientific discourse representing neutrality, rationality, and objectivity. In front of this imposing structure, scientific discourse replaces the sacredness of what opposes it. The number of labels visible through the boxes depends on chance, with the difference in height subtly constructing a sort of "hierarchical classification." Faced with this column, the viewer's vision is determined by a height they cannot choose from birth. The difference in height, which does not participate in the construction of class order in our symbolic reality, echoes the innate identity differences causing various conflicts in social reality. Here, the short may not see the labels at the top, while the tall may only see all these meaningless symbols — an illusion formed by a collage of three types of names of dubious veracity — the equality between words and things.
In the end, only a heap of names remains, onto which humanity projects all its loves and hates.
The Hole of the 'Lunar Seas', Part II: The Cracked Plates
image transfer on stone, sculpture, installation,
alabaster, universal ground
The title of Yukio Mishima's novel "The Sea of Fertility" is borrowed from the name of the "Mare Fecunditatis" on the Moon — a region that seems abundant in liquid, but is actually empty, as the lunar "sea" has no water; it is a crater, a hole. Can we then say that impact craters are the truth behind the name "lunar sea"? The artist transferred images of the "lunar sea" taken by NASA onto the surface of alabaster (a stone that contains water), thus simulating the cracked plates of the "lunar sea." The organic soils of Earth have replaced the inorganic lunar soils to create a simulation of the impact crater. When these two simulations meet, will they open a path to the Real, or will they further push the limits of our understanding towards the impossible?
Self-engulfment of the Black Hole
installation,
Chinese Ink, printers, plexiglass
The moment a person encounters the Symbolic Order and becomes a subject, they are captured by language. If we cannot find the truth of the world through language, then, at all moments when signifiers lose their meaning, or before all symbols are constructed, does the truth exist there? Printers use ink to produce signifiers, ink being akin to a pre-discursive raw material. Just as the subject is subjugated by language, and thus spoken by the Other before they can speak. When the ink engulfs the printer, its internal mechanism is destroyed and it loses all function of producing signifiers, "The raw material I used to produce destroyed my own production," becoming an internal looped black hole. The scanning screens inside the printer, soaked with ink, become black mirrors, reflecting the image of the viewer, leaving behind only the image of oneself.
Before me, the flood; After ME, the language.
© Ugo Casubolo Ferro
The Hole of the 'Lunar Seas', Part III: Grazing the Ghosts
film photography,
photo print on transparent film
The portraits of marine fossil specimens, captured by film photography at the National Musuem of Natural History Paris, have their negatives immersed in the developer (a metaphor for seawater/amniotic fluid), then reprinted in a returning way on transparent films, suspended at the entrance to the underground cave.
Echoing previous works (series The Hole of the 'Lunar Seas'), the portraits of fossils, as re-simulations of reproductions, have not been preserved in the simulation of the museum's glass boxes, but rather dispersed as intangible and mysterious objects, floating in the air like specters, their forms almost transparent, waiting in the corridor. To continue exploring the exhibition, visitors must pass among these ghosts, barely touching them. How many ghosts, in the process of "knowing" the world, have always been beyond the possibilities of knowledge, infinite, condemning us to eternal defeat? At the moment we cross the threshold of the history museum, is it us who visit the ghosts, or is it the ghosts who gaze back at us?
The bodies of the spectators also participate, the contact of the skin with the photos providing a corporeal effect, which the artist calls Corpo-Réel, a word she invented, a homophone of the French word "corporel," composed of "corps" (body) and "réel" (real).
Endless conversation: Filling the hole
interactive sound installation
telescope, sensor, arduino
The telescope is oriented towards the position of the black hole in space at level 0 (Self-engulfment of the Black Hole). Inside the lens is a hidden interactive sound program, where two AI-generated characters discuss the question, "Is this world real?" The conversation lasts six minutes and is entirely generated automatically by AI, traversing the fields of physics, philosophy, mythology, etc., condensing millennia of human understanding of the world. The last sentence of the conversation connects back to the first, creating an endless loop, a sonic Möbius strip, an endless conversation.
As soon as the sensor inside the telescope detects a person in front of it, it immediately stops the sound transmission. It seems that a microcosm exists inside the telescope, where the viewers are not observers but the observed. The inspiration comes from quantum mechanics experiments and the "observer effect."
© Ugo Casubolo Ferro
EVENT HORIZON
installation
LED neon
“AND WHEN DOES IT START AND WHEN DOES IT END” — these ten words form a circle, installed on the wall of the cave. In this design, two types of questioning about the “origin” and the “end” are involved. The first question concerns the structure of this phrase itself. Where does this sentence begin? Spectators, placed in the exhibition space, are enveloped 360 degrees by these ten words forming a circular structure, and thus cannot determine the beginning or the end of this sentence from a grammatical point of view. The second question refers to the question posed by the sentence itself: When did all this (the universe) begin? When will it end? Our process of inquiry and knowledge always takes place within the Symbolic Order, just as in this cave space, spectators are enveloped by this endless phrase, and the circular structure forms the extension of the black hole.
Thus, the outline of the “event horizon” is sketched. According to the definition of astrophysics, it is a concept used to name the boundary surrounding a black hole, beyond which no light or other radiation can escape. The end of possibility, the beginning of impossibility.
© Ugo Casubolo Ferro
MIND MAP ( Labyrinths? A vortex? An outer circle around a black hole? ) OF ARTIST’S CONCEPT
THE GREAT FLOOD
The great flood #01
Printer, branches, clay, aquarium, water, ink, paper
I created an interactive program in Pure Data to enable the printer to automatically produce the same mythology about the Flood in different languages randomly. This version of the mythology exists in material form for only three seconds, as it then dissipates underwater and loses the possibility of being read. It is an implementation that mimics the mechanism of the performative, namely the reiteration of discourse which, through repetition, brings about an artificial reality interpreted by humanity. It also alludes to the historical and scientific narration through which we have a vision of the world.
The great flood #02
ceramic, Ipad
This work was inspired by Plato's allegory of the cave. I created a ceramic cave and placed an iPad inside it, projecting an image of fire. Unlike Plato's fire, this fire cannot illuminate the cave, and there are no shadows through which one can distinguish two worlds. Therefore, the two worlds blend together. This piece was created during the lockdown, where everyone could only know the world through 2D images. With the digitization of the world, the boundary between the virtual and reality has become increasingly blurred. My work illustrates this modern metaphor of the cave.
The great flood #03
Painting, glass, sand, screens, sensors, sound
I created six portraits of extinct species based on images from Wikipedia and placed them in glass boxes, mimicking fossils in Museums. The Museum is a simulacrum of once-living beings; this installation does not aim to restore or repeat this kind of simulacrum, but to construct a simulacrum of the simulacrum. I question the evidence and the artificial narration that form the so-called true history. These creations of false 2D fossils represent the absolute death of death, meaning the death that is impossible to witness.
The three screens connected with sensors that detect the presence of the audience will display the years of each species' extinction. The numbers are synchronized with clock sounds recorded at my grandparents' house during the period after my grandfather's death, forming a symphony of time. This rush of disappearance evokes a deep anxiety related to the final judgment. When people are present, the extinction years appear, and when people leave, the extinction years disappear.
The great flood #04
photograph
An image of the Earth's simulation in NASA's Eyes software, taken by a camera facing the computer screen. Using a shutter speed of 30 seconds, the trace of the Earth's movement is evident and condensed. The South Pole was erased by NASA, so in this photo, the Earth's rotation has transformed the Antarctic region into a black hole. If technological progress signifies humanity's potential to understand the world, does this "invisible" area symbolize a sudden cessation, that is, the impossibility of knowledge?
The great flood #05
Photo, interactive program
The error in the 3D rendering and the failure of the photo stitching have generated three black holes on this image of the Earth. Defective beings are constantly created from this failing maternal body. I am trying to write an ontology of the erroneous. It is about existence that is ontologically flawed.
SOLO EXPOSITION, Avant moi, le déluge, at Zetoart gallery, Paris, 2022
Curators: Yingting BAI, Yiyao XU
Le Déluge est un mythe présent dans de nombreuses civilisations. Avant notre époque, les données rigoureusement objectives n’existaient pas, il n’y a que des mythes oraux, qui constituent les négatifs de la civilisation humaine, impossibles à vérifier. Le déluge représente un symbole de la mort absolue, et les preuves de son existence manquent, comme le trou dans le savoir.
Les fossiles exposés dans les musées peuvent-ils remplacer l'existence d'animaux disparus pour être connus par l'humanité? Dans la série “Le résidu des mythologies”(The Great Flood #01 et The Great Flood #03), Jiang Jier utilise un langage pictural abstrait pour diluer à nouveau ces existences mortes, rendant la vérité encore plus obscure. L'installation interactive capte également la présence du spectateur, les carillons de deuil s'approchent lorsque les capteurs sont activés, suscitent l’angoisse de l'artiste face à l'existence et à la destruction ; en absence du spectateur, l'année de la disparition de l'espèce et les carillons traumatisants s'estompent dans l’absolu.
Les branches ramassées dans la forêt deviennent la base d'un produit moderne — une imprimante, le lieu où les mythes du déluge préhistoriques sont imprimés au hasard dans des dizaines de langues différentes, et après quelques secondes de lisibilité, la langue se dissipe immédiatement dans la mare d'encre. Tout ce qui est inintelligible, est comme le visage flou et inaccessible d'un mythe, et les tentatives de comprendre et de définir les origines du monde et de l'homme sont vouées à la futilité.
Comme le souligne Beckett dans “Peintres de l’empêchement", l'objet du régime représentatif résiste toujours à la représentation, l’art ne fait qu'exprimer les conditions de cette dérobade. La série "trou" (The great flood #02, The great flood #04 et The great flood #05) ne cherche donc pas à représenter une réalité disparue, mais plutôt les défauts de la manière d'aborder le monde lui-même. La crise épidémique a conduit l'artiste à repenser le partage du sensible: le feu éteint sur l'écran de l'ipad constitue un espace partagé virtuel et la caverne non éclairée représente une réalité physique privée découpée du monde. Par rapport à l’allégorie de la caverne de Platon, le réel et l'irréel du monde sont entrelacés dans cette caverne, nous allons nous engager dans quel sens de la réalité?
Retranchée dans cette "caverne", Jiang Jier ne reproduit plus le simulacre, mais crée le simulacre du simulacre - elle utilise l'appareil photo pour faire une longue exposition au globe terrestre sur l'écran de l'ordinateur, et au-dessus de l’image du simulacre, le pôle Sud effacé, tourne comme un trou noir, produisant un secret inaccessible. Jouant sur l'ambiguïté, elle fait à nouveau une matrice qui s’auto-reproduit à partir de cette photo par le biais d'un programme interactif, l’erreur du rendu photoréaliste engendre de nouveau une infinité.
Les stands des musées, les machines de performativité, les autels, ces récits de pouvoir en haut dans ses oeuvres perdent la lisibilité, la frontière entre le virtuel et le réel n'est plus cohérente, la mort absolue des mortes se dresse au-dessus, impossible à témoigner, impossible à pleurer, impossible à tracer. Peindre, c’est pour peindre ce qui empêche de peindre; écrire, c’est pour montrer la défaillance de l’écriture.
Comme le dit Lacan, nous n'avons aucun moyen direct d'entrer dans le réel, à savoir le registre du trauma. À travers la fonction symbolique, on ne peut qu’arpenter le contours du réel. Le réel est comme un trou qui résiste à toute forme de raisonnement ou de logique. Il ne reste que le résidu de la symbolisation.
BAI Yingting
XU Yiyao