The exhibition “To the Son of Man Who Ate the Scroll” will be presented in the spaces of the Podium and the Cistern at Fondazione Prada in Milan. The project is by Goshka Macuga (Warsaw, Poland), who in his artistic research plays the normally separate roles of author, curator, collector, researcher and inventor of exhibitions. The artist operates at the point of contact between different disciplines like sculpture, installation, photography, architecture and design.

“To the Son of Man Who Ate the Scroll” marks the culmination of a long in-depth research project aimed at formulating a method for categorizing materials and information regarding fundamental questions like time, origins, the end, the collapse, rebirth.

In the exhibition, the artist explores the art of rhetoric and artificial memory as coordinated instruments, able to organize and to advance knowledge. Historically, the “Ars memorativa” (the art of memory) forms the basis of artificial memory by extending and developing natural memory through complex visualizations that help us to remember specific information.

Observing with a critical detachment the anguish that unites humanity when it approaches the objective reality of its end, Macuga asks himself a fundamental question: how important is it to address the issue of “the end” in the context of current artistic practice? The possibility of thinking of the universe in an abstract and objective way, and to think of ourselves as human beings, allows us to determine the age in which we live as one of the many eras of the universe, and to imagine an existence after us, a posthuman world governed by artificial intelligence.