No One has Lived in the Past... and No One Will Live in the Future

No one has lived in the past… and no one will live in the future

“From the outside, you can’t tell what is inside a black hole. … You can throw television sets, diamond rings, or even your worst enemies into a black hole, and all the black hole will remember is the total mass, and the state of rotation.”

- Roger Penrose

Projected across the courtyard floor of Rocca Pia, No one has lived in the past… and no one will live in the future unfolds as an immersive environment of light, sound, and movement. The work draws on Roger Penrose’s Nobel-recognized discovery that black hole formation is not a speculative anomaly but an inevitable outcome of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Penrose demonstrated that when a massive star collapses under its own gravity, space and time curve into a singularity, a point of infinite density where the known laws of physics cease to operate.

In dialogue with Carlo Rovelli’s meditations on white holes, theoretical inversions of black holes, where matter and light emerge instead of vanish, the work reflects on the delicate balance between contraction and expansion, disappearance and renewal.

Visitors entering the courtyard become part of this gravitational field of light, their bodies tracing shifting geometries across the stone. From the terraces above, the work appears as a living cosmogram, Rocca Pia’s architecture bending into the fabric of spacetime.

Borrowing its title from Godard’s Alphaville, and its refrain, “No one has lived in the past, and no one will live in the future,” the performance becomes a cosmological immersion, a place where time folds inward, and only the eternal present remains.