In 2025, comet C/2025 X1 struck Earth. Everything vanished: life, infrastructures, digital memory. Centuries later, an alien civilization discovers, buried in the ruins of a photography museum, a series of analog prints depicting stones. With no metadata or captions, they become the only clues to speculate on the shape of the lost world. Stones, seemingly eternal objects, are rendered through ancient photographic techniques that share the same illusion of permanence. By pure chance, they outlived the planet—mute traces of a vanished species, yet equally destined to erosion. “I speak of stones older than life itself […] in which a mystery vaster than the fate of an ephemeral species is both hidden and revealed” (Roger Caillois).
about the artist
Carlotta Valente explores historical photographic processes through analog techniques and material experimentation. Her work reflects on memory and time, highlighting the physical presence of photography as resistance to oblivion.
