A wave sweeps across the Sistine Façade of the Vatican Apostolic Library. It is Diluvium, the monumental installation created by JR for AQVA, the first chapter of the exhibition cycle Catastrophe and Wonder. Inspired by Gustave Doré’s illustrations of the Great Flood, the work places on the Library façade the image of a force capable of overwhelming everything in its path.
It is an especially resonant image for a library. Water and books have an ambivalent relationship: leaks and floods can damage paper and parchment, but water is also used in restoration processes. In the exhibition, two films show how it can help remove old reinforcements from sheets and support interventions on damaged areas.
This double role runs through the whole exhibition. One section recalls the 1966 Florence flood; another presents Ippolito Salviani’s Aquatilium animalium historia, printed in 1557 and placed at the centre of the exhibition as an example of how water has also been observed, studied and represented.
JR reappears at the end of the exhibition with Undae, a video installation built around the image of a wave filmed in Brazil. If water appears on the façade as a threat to the memory preserved by the Library, in the Barberini Hall it becomes the focus of a space devoted to contemplation.
It is precisely this ambivalence that gives AQVA its coherence: water can endanger heritage, but it can also contribute to its preservation and become a subject of study and artistic creation. The exhibition does not resolve this contradiction; it makes it visible.
