designed by BGGB.studio (Sara Bologna + Luca Gruber)
all images: Nasrin Abbasi
“We are ignorant of the meaning of the dragon in the same way that we are ignorant of the meaning of the universe, but there is something in the dragon’s image that fits man’s imagination, and this accounts for the dragon’s appearance in different places and periods.”
[J. L. Borges, preface to The Book of Imaginary Beings]
Speculative evolution is a common trope in sci-fi literature, focused on hypothetical scenarios in the evolution of life.
What would animals look like in the far future on Planet Earth, long after humanity has vanished? With Earth's ecosystems undergoing extreme transformations due to millennia of unchecked evolution, climate shifts, and new symbiotic relationships, new species will emerge.
Challenging common dichotomies between scientific and symbolic knowledge, epistemic and aesthetic modes of visualization, the Arquà Manuscript Collection presents dream-like scenarios inhabited by fantastic creatures, moving on the foreground of a post-human world, where new balances have come to establish as a result of the diminished influence of the human species on ecosystems.
This imaginary journey in Time is ideally entrusted to Artificial Intelligence, which, just like pre-modern explorers of exotic lands, reports (more or less) reliable descriptions of what it finds on this unknown Earth, eroding the treshold between perceived and imagined reality. Another generative Artificial Intelligence is then asked to translate these descriptions from text to image. Similarly to what happened in the Middle Ages in the compilation of Bestiaries, the passage from text to image through AI also involves frequent loss of information, and remixes of stock repertories of familiar animals.
On a deeper level of the analogy with the Middle Ages, the work aims to trigger a reflection on the nearly eschatological sense of the creative practice. If today we delude ourselves about the scientifiability of the cosmos through technology, the medieval conception of the world was able to embrace the magical and the miraculous instead as the natural implication of the physical realm, which in turn was intrinsically symbolic because it mirrored a superior reality. Prodigious creatures like the amphisbaena and the manticore, for example, were natural realities that man plainly was not meant to experience. They might seem monstrous but not necessarily “unreal”.
The imagery of the Arquà manuscript arises from a collective dream conjured up from databases, which ultimately are measurable expressions of human activity and knowledge.
They invite us to reflect not just about the future, but also about the present, embodying current discourses and practices, fears and hopes. In this sense, the animals of the Arquà Manuscript reverberate the same conception that guided Medieval miniaturists when painting their bestiaries, where the Lion and the Unicorn shared the same degree of ontology, somehow analogous to that of data: it is not because something cannot be seen that it does not exist.
The Arquà Manuscript is the debut work of BGGB studio, a narrative and research-based creative practice initiated by Sara Bologna and Luca Gruber.
Read more about the project in the press:
_ Artribune / 5 Avant-garde experiments on textiles of tomorrow
_ Elle Decor / Collectible Brussels 2025: The pieces we loved the most
_ Cieloterradesign / The tapestry from the Middle Ages designed with AI
_ Exibart / Selection from Collectible Fair 2025
_ Residence NL / Highlights from Collectible Fair 2025