During September of 1991, a 47-year-old unemployed Italian man named Piero Cannata caused damage to Michelangelo's David by striking it with a hammer that had been concealed on his person. Specifically, he fractured the left digitus secundus pedis of the statue, which is widely regarded as one of the most iconic and recognizable sculptures in the world. According to the perpetrator, he had received orders to carry out this act from a Venetian noblewoman who lived during the 16th century. Her precise identity remains unknown, but she was immortalized by the Renaissance painter Paolo Veronese in his work titled La Bella Nani.

Beyond the extravagance that represents the otherworldly intervention of an iconoclastic spirit, this episode is far from being an isolated event. It is is inscribed into a series of incidents throughout different historical moments in the global arena, where individuals or groups unpredictably attack all sorts of objects that even tangentially fulfill certain fixed ideological functions. These do not represent acts of faith, but dissident gestures intended to manifest disagreement against the norm, be it aesthetic, political, religious, economic or social, some of them even seeking to impose an opposite standard.

The concept of barbarism connotes a deviation from well-trodden paths. However, a vice or incorrectness can always offer, in another context, an open possibility, a latency. Spectacularizing the cataclysm is now a happening of the everyday, as if the end of the world could be one and identical for everyone. Barbarisms does not revolve around revolutionary plans for a glorified future. Moreover, it puts forward a set of frictions as reliable indicators of the multiple perspectives that coexist in the face of imminent planetary demise. In this state of entropy, the sublime has been irrevocably fragmented and may no longer hold relevance at all.

The exhibition features thirteen stances which advocate for the acceptance of imbalance and uncertainty. The artists refer to distinct subjective worlds that coexist in a chaotic yet minimal conversation, challenging a bleak environment that finds in sameness its lazy leitmotiv. It is a choral narrative structured through such crucial issues as migration, mental health, environmental crisis, structural violence, and liquid identities amidst a weary era. This intergenerational cohort deploys a repertoire of strategies for controlled decay, which can be deemed as the new institutionalization of collapse, where everyone is a failed poet.