Like a funeral chant, visceral and profound, an ancient Greek threnody, in which alternating choruses and solo voices accompanied the deceased in their final farewell, so too the solo exhibition Pompeii Threnody by Cerith Wyn Evans leads the visitor into an unconscious and involuntary dialogue “with those and with that which, deep down, continue to live in Pompeii,” evoking the enduring vitality of memory.

Pompeii Threnody is the first site-specific exhibition of the program Pompeii Commitment. Archaeological Matters, specifically conceived for the Antiquarium of Boscoreale and Villa Regina, offering a new interpretation of these places through the language of contemporaneity.

The exhibition, curated by Andrea Viliani with Stella Bottai, Laura Mariano, and Caterina Avataneo, will be open to the public from Saturday, 19 July 2025 to Sunday, 11 January 2026.

Pompeii Threnody explores memory, time, and transformation—central elements in the work of the artist, one of the most refined and poetic figures on the international scene. Twelve works are on display, ten of which were specially created for the occasion, in a suggestive dialogue between archaeological material and contemporary imagination. Among these:
• nine photo-etchings dedicated to the cypresses of the Sarno plain, evoking the geological and memorial dimension of the Vesuvius landscape;
• a light installation inspired by the ceremonial chariot found in Civita Giuliana, featuring the famous Latin palindrome IN GIRUM IMUS NOCTE ET CONSUMIMUR IGNI, “We go wandering at night and are consumed by fire.”
• two lamp-sculptures shaped like golden palms, placed in the patio of the Antiquarium, in dialogue with the architecture of the nearby Villa Regina.

The visit path is introduced by the bronze statue of an ephebe lamp-bearer. His lips bear only traces of the ancient golden coating, a fragmentary memory and faint echo of a material and a vital celebration now almost, but not yet completely, vanished. The same color accompanies us, like a trace carried onto the walls throughout the route.

Climbing the stairs, in the first room on the 1st floor is exhibited the series of nine photo-etchings Pompeii Threnody (The Ancient Cypress Trees of the Sarno Plain), in which details of the fossilized remains of ancient cypress trees from the Sarno river plain appear on paper.

In the artist’s words, “by detailing the profound beauty of these natural specimens, preserved and venerated,” the photo-etchings are “highly aestheticized studies, formally austere and elegantly presented, meditations on the unveiling of occluded matter. In the same way, the trees (roots) excavated and exposed (to the elements) are here documented, arrested, and exposed (to the photochemical environment). A representation of the urge to contain and capture, to reify and dwell with the fetish, to linger on its transcendent organic wonder, on its status and capacity to produce awe: Sic transit...”

As an artistic technique, photo-etching corresponds to a photographic flat printing process on a zinc plate, in which the image is not drawn as in traditional etchings, but photographed onto a layer of light-sensitive varnish, then applied to a printing plate. Using the combinatory and process-based technique of photogravure (photo-etching), Evans condenses—into a multiple matrix and a patient layering—both past and present time, as well as the natural and cultural consistency of these ancient roots, which survived a volcanic eruption and are now preserved in the museum Antiquarium. For the artist, they become interspecies memorials of the activism of these ancient organic materials, but also evidence of their willingness to be transformed into possible historical documents and meditations on the mystery of what we define as a “work of art.”

In the adjacent room on the 1st floor, the ceremonial chariot from Civita Giuliana, discovered in 2021, is on display—serving as the climax and focal point of the exhibition. Here, one of the versions of Evans’s series of works titled IN GIRUM IMUS NOCTE ET CONSUMIMUR IGNI, 2025, is exhibited. These works vary in size and light color across their different iterations. This particular version takes its dimensions from the wheels of the Civita Giuliana chariot and it consits of transparent glass with argon gas.

The artist comments: “The famous Latin palindrome (which I was introduced to by the French Situationist author Guy Debord, who used it as the title of one of his films) is often translated into English as ‘We go wandering at night and are consumed by fire.’ Recalling the ‘myth’ — again and again — the Eternal Return, the temporal infrastructure of trauma... is condemned to repetition. Here, we return to a ‘recycled’ work, to be reiterated for and upon Pompeii. I realised that the work has, in fact, found its home — even though I’ve returned to this phrase multiple times and created, through various iterations, works with text, moving images, neon, fireworks… this opportunity to situate the piece in Pompeii carries a unique meaning and relevance never previously attained. The work ‘belongs’ to Pompeii. The ever-circulating oscillation, back and forth, manifests a singularity — like a ‘feedback loop’. Here — in situ — it becomes a corollary to the immobilised wheels of the chariot… a phantom vehicle, constellated with what survives the erosion of time… like an additional source of light added to the exquisite complexity of the shadows projected by the Perspex frame in the current display. A ceremony. It sounds. An epitaph suspended in gas and glass… with relatives in other realms of meaning — such as, for example, photography (a light refrain). An interface between matter (material artefact) and representation — the hinge upon which they swing — ‘friction’ as contact, the point where they ‘touch’.”

In Boscoreale, the work becomes a wheel of time and the manifestation of the perpetual and interconnected oscillation of all matter, all meaning, and all representation. 

The exhibition finally includes a more intimate passage that brings the public dimension of the show to an almost domestic scale, where the Antiquarium seems to take on the appearance of, and accommodate, the behaviors we might have observed in the ancient Roman Villa next to the museum.

In the outdoor patio connecting the ground floor and the first floor, two lamps from the artist’s collection are installed—modern furnishings that replicate the trunks and leaves of two golden palm trees. The luminous reflection of their metallic silhouettes spreads along the surrounding walls, accompanying with its vibrations the spirals traced by some goldfish in the basin that, on one side of the patio, replicates the impluvium of ancient domus. Closing (or reopening?) the circle of the exhibition itself, in this secluded corner and unexpected moment of quiet, the artist seems to seek and bring together—as if they were one—the light and darkness, instant and duration, presence and absence, history and everyday life, public and private, human and non-human, as if the Antiquarium and the Villa had finally reunited, and someone were whispering to us at the same time “welcome” or “welcome back”?

With his Trenodia di Pompei, Evans brings his own story and stories into that and those of Pompeii: a precious dialogue, or rather a “feedback” (to quote the artist himself), that truly recalls and re-enchants the circular Pompeian space-time, the context of its eternal returns, its ever-returning and ever-living journey toward itself. “Consumed by fire” (as in the ancient eruption evoked by Evans’s contemporary neon and photo-etchings), Pompeii is still here, with its chariots and its trees, its myths and its daily life, its human, animal, mineral, and vegetal inhabitants all eternally together as companions of the same fate, something frightening but inevitable, unsettling and dreamlike but real and reassuring. And, therefore, in the end, simply right.

Two of Evans’s works produced for the exhibition – Pompeii Threnody (IN GIRUM IMUS NOCTE ET CONSUMIMUR IGNI) and Pompeii Threnody (The Ancient Cypress Trees of the Sarno Plain), 2025 – become part of the contemporary art collection of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii (Collectio), joining those of the artists Simone Fattal, Lara Favaretto, Invernomuto, Luisa Lambri, Anna Maria Maiolino, Anri Sala, and Wael Shawky.

The exhibition was supported by the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation.

Photo credit: Amedeo Benestante. Courtesy Cerith Wyn Evans and Parco Archeologico di Pompei