A black obsidian meteorite has just fallen from the sky in the Turin artist-run space Mucho Mas!, where it becomes a calamitous image of the end of an era. This is one of the works visible until April 5 in Sibylle Duboc’s exhibition Scomparsa/Disparition, the outcome of a period of research and residency at Museo Nazionale della Montagna in Turin and Musée des Merveilles in Tende. It was precisely in the latter place that the artist observed petroglyphs dating back to the Bronze Age, which she reproduces on the plaster and bitumen surface of the meteorite, thus establishing a bridge between past and future to address the present: rock art tells us about humanity’past, while the bituminous mass comes from the future to admonish us, as those directly responsible for the disappearance of the Alpine glaciers. This is happening today with such speed that no trace of its occurrence remains.
Sibylle Duboc, “Scomparsa/Disparition”, Mucho Mas!, Torino, 2025. Foto © Luca Vianello, courtesy Mucho Mas!
The glaciers, in fact, are the protagonists of the exhibition, which continues with a series of concrete sculptures, arranged in the room like satellites gravitating around the meteorite. The concrete geodes show, on part of their surface, the satellite images of icebergs from melting glaciers in Greenland, while the inner recess are the imprint of glaciers on the verge of disappearing. Thanks to this dual reference, the sculptures acquire the value of funereal masks of an absence made solid, heavy, palpable. If, in nature, the geode contains a mineral that has formed over millions of years, in the exhibition it appears as the materialization of the ongoing climate crisis, made even more tangible through the use of concrete, a construction material used as a voracious assailant of spaces not yet urbanized.
Sibylle Duboc, “Fossili fotografici di iceberg nell’Artico”, emulsione fotosensibile, cemento, vermiculite e gesso, 2025, in “Scomparsa/Disparition”, Mucho Mas!, Torino, 2025. Foto © Luca Vianello, courtesy Mucho Mas!
In this oscillation between past, present and future, Fotoglifi series is also present – a collection of shots of the thousand-year-old rock carvings observed by Duboc in the Vallée des Merveilles, traces left along the glacial streaks formed after the melting of the Würm glaciation. The photographs – or rather, the screenshots of these photographs – contain both the signs of petroglyphs left during the Bronze Age and the signs of our relationship with images, compulsively collected in abundance in digital galleries that we end up saturating and never looking at again. This too, after all, is a way of leaving a trace of oneself as durable as it is ephemeral, with images that are continuous forms of pollution, of mediation and intermediation, of anesthetization to what appears on our screens, including unsustainable ways and lifestyles and their consequences.
Sibylle Duboc, “Meteorite – Incisioni rupestri di ghiacciai in via di estinzione nelle Alpi”, gesso e bitume, 2025, in “Scomparsa/Disparition”, Mucho Mas!, Torino, 2025. Foto © Luca Vianello, courtesy Mucho Mas!
Facing the melting of glaciers that proceeds without a trace because of its unstoppable speed, Duboc’s work constitutes an attempt to preserve and activate the traces of that melting, to make visible a disappearance thought of as silent and distant, but which is the most direct consequence of our lifestyles, consumption, and anthropization. If we cannot recover what is being lost with the melting of glaciers, we can at least attempt to preserve a memory, set it in motion and interrogate it in order to project it into the future. With this in mind, in conjunction with the closing of the exhibition and as part of the Museo Nazionale della Montagna’s Walking Mountains Social Walks program, the performance The March of the Glaciers will take place on April 5 – a shared walk that will lead to the creation of a corpus of prints as the out-put of a moment of collective activation regarding a unifying experience for the current generation of the planet such as the progressive loss of glaciers.
Sibylle Duboc, “Fotoglifi”, serie di 8 stampe ai sali d’argento, 2025; “Scomparsa/Disparition”, Mucho Mas!, Torino, 2025. Foto © Luca Vianello, courtesy Mucho Mas!
What was once visible only over many years is now much more immediate, intangible and overwhelming, and we need to equip ourselves with critical, imaginative and collective tools to understand and deal with it. The exhibition thus advances an invitation to see up close what can usually only be seen from satellite and secular distances and, at the same time, to rethink our connection to the earth before it becomes uninhabitable.
Costanza Mazzucchelli
Info:
Scomparsa/Disparition. Sibylle Duboc
13/02/2025 – 06/04/2025
Mucho Mas
Corso Brescia, 89, 10154, Torino
www.muchomas.gallery
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