OUR PRESENT. THEIR PAST.
ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE FUTURE
One day, someone might find what you choose to wear today.
They might recognise the metal, study a figure, trace an engraving with their fingers. And wonder who you were. Why you chose that particular symbol. What story you carried with you.
This possibility is the starting point for DECEM’s Archaeology of the Future: the artistic vision through which I imagine my creations, made in Venice today, as testimonies that can travel through time.
— Paolo Grillo
BEFORE THE ARTEFACT,
THERE WAS LIFE
Every work begins in the present.
I sculpt it to be worn, to meet a person and become part of their identity. A myth can express a strength you recognise in yourself. A face can hold a memory. A symbol can give shape to something you feel, even when words are not enough.
Then another story begins.
The places you will take it. The people who will see it. The gestures you will repeat while wearing it.
Through this life, an object begins to hold memories.
WHAT WILL REMAIN
OF US?
Imagine a hand other than your own, in a distant time.
Before it lies the same work. Perhaps its observer does not know your name. Yet something remains: a choice, an image, a presence entrusted to metal.
They try to piece together its meaning.
Did that skull speak of death, courage or the will to live? Was that figure a form of protection, belonging, remembrance?
The object is still there. The answers must be sought.
MATTER PRESERVES.
SYMBOLS TRANSMIT.
Gold and silver have material value. When shaped into a work of art, they also hold a thought.
A sculpted figure tells us what a culture observed, feared and desired. It reveals the images we chose to represent ourselves and the stories to which we entrusted a part of who we were.
In my vision, the value of a work includes this possibility: continuing to raise questions, even when the world in which it was created is far away.
Matter can endure. Meaning can travel, change and be rediscovered.
MATTER CAN ENDURE.
MEANING CAN BE REDISCOVERED.
RELICTA.
IN SEARCH OF MEMORY.
This vision extends into RELICTA, the narrative universe I am developing around memory and rediscovery.
In a distant future, marked by the loss of much of humanity’s earlier knowledge, the fortified city of Minngard gathers and studies surviving traces of the past. Among them, precious metal objects hold a double value: that of their material and that of the knowledge they may restore.
DECEM’s archaeological records adopt the perspective of these imaginary researchers.
They observe the works, record their features and propose interpretations of their meaning. Through an artefact, they seek the people who created, chose and wore it.
YOU TOO BECOME
PART OF ITS STORY.
When you choose a DECEM work, its story meets yours.
The symbol begins with my vision. The meaning it will acquire in your life belongs to you.
Perhaps it will stay with you. Perhaps it will pass to someone else. Perhaps, one day, someone will study it and try to imagine who you were.