Photography, video, digital image, text, mixed media
THEY ARE COMING
Photography, video, digital image, mixed media
2012–ongoing
Selected works from THEY ARE COMING, 2012–2015.
THEY ARE COMING began with a statement that was not true, but became psychologically real.
On June 6, 2012, during a dinner, one of the guests casually announced that an asteroid was supposedly on a collision course with Earth and would destroy the planet on December 21 of that year. The information was immediately dismissed as absurd. Yet for Arsenia Sirente, the possibility entered the imagination and began to take on a life of its own.
For the following six months, her nights were inhabited by apocalyptic dreams, alien invasions and visions of war. Anxiety and panic progressively altered her perception of reality. When December 21 passed without catastrophe, these experiences abruptly ceased.
What remained was a fundamental question: if an event never happens, but the idea of it can nevertheless transform the way we perceive the world, where does reality begin and imagination end?
This question became the foundation of THEY ARE COMING, an ongoing investigation into the psychological power of the unknown and the mechanisms through which fear becomes an image, a belief and eventually a collective narrative.
Arsenia Sirente's research begins with the individual encounter with uncertainty and progressively expands toward the collective. The unknown is never directly accessible; it can only be approached through the forms we invent to represent it. Mythology, science fiction, cinema, news imagery, conspiracy narratives and religious or cultural belief systems become technologies for giving shape to what cannot be seen or controlled.
The project therefore does not attempt to depict a catastrophe. It examines the human need to imagine one.
The first body of work, created in 2012–2013, translates an internal psychological experience into a fictional visual universe. Sirente constructs images in which familiar reality begins to destabilize:
The work moves through different states of the unknown: matter before it becomes recognizable, the possibility of extraterrestrial life, the unfamiliarity of the sky, the anticipation of conflict, and the traces left after humanity has disappeared.
Water, minerals, salt, sediment and light form landscapes suspended between geological memory and imagined worlds, evoking a state of matter before human perception gives it a name. Other images introduce the possibility of an extraterrestrial presence, turning the landscape into a site of encounter with an unknown intelligence. Elsewhere, Sirente imagines a world after catastrophe, where bombs and other threats have already passed and humanity has vanished, leaving nature to slowly reclaim the spaces it once occupied. Warplanes crossing the sky above Paris transform an ordinary urban landscape into a premonition of conflict, while a series of observatories remain as possible final traces of a vanished civilisation, watching over a world in which there is no one left to observe.
Within this construction of speculative fiction, Sirente also turns toward material evidence, documenting an archived collection of desert glass formed through the extreme heat associated with a meteorite event in the Sahara. Fragments of fused sand become traces of a planetary event that occurred long before the image was made, shifting the work from imagined catastrophe toward geological memory and collapsing the distance between speculation and reality.
An installation along the Trebbia River introduces an unknown organic form resembling an alien egg into an otherwise familiar landscape, suggesting the possibility of something emerging, hatching, or already existing beyond human knowledge.
Together, these works construct a fragmented archaeology of possible worlds, moving between speculative fiction, geological evidence and the psychological projection of the unknown, while imagining a future in which humanity is no longer the protagonist.
Anxiety Trigger, 2022, 5 min 39 sec, Supercut ,
single-channel video, color, sound, looped.
BREEDED IMAGES digitally transforms Sirente’s own self-portraits into a series of genetically modified figures, imagining a post-apocalyptic world in which humanity has disappeared and a new generation emerges from a single surviving lineage. Created well before the widespread introduction of AI image generation, the series uses digital manipulation as a speculative tool to imagine an “after world” in which Sirente’s image becomes the genetic and visual source of a new humanity.
Each portrait is altered through aleatory mathematical coordinates, producing unpredictable mutations and variations of the original body. The resulting figures are neither portraits nor conventional representations of human beings, but speculative descendants—iterations of a body transformed by chance, mathematics and digital processes. Together, they form an imagined population born after the disappearance of the human world, questioning what remains of identity, individuality and humanity when the original subject no longer exists.
ANXIETY TRIGGER brings together scenes of meteorite impacts and alien invasions from popular cinema. The work exposes the feedback loop between fear and representation: we imagine catastrophe through images, while images simultaneously teach us what catastrophe is supposed to look like.
The evolution of THEY ARE COMING mirrors the movement of fear itself: from the mind, to the image, from the image to the collective imagination, and from collective imagination back into the individual.
In this sense, catastrophe is ultimately a vehicle rather than the subject. The asteroid, the alien, the war, the explosion and the post-apocalyptic landscape are manifestations of a deeper human confrontation: the impossibility of knowing what comes next.
The project is informed by terror management theory and the sociology of fear, particularly the idea that awareness of mortality generates systems of meaning through which individuals and societies attempt to contain existential uncertainty. THEY ARE COMING approaches these mechanisms not as fixed explanations, but as material for artistic investigation.
The work ultimately proposes the unknown as both threat and creative territory. Faced with what cannot be understood, humanity produces images, myths and stories. We populate the invisible with creatures, construct narratives around the unknowable, and transform uncertainty into recognizable forms.
THEY ARE COMING asks what happens in that transformation and what our imagined catastrophes reveal about the civilization imagining them.
The catastrophe didn’t come yet. The image did.