For some reason, when we talk to each other about the world, its improbabilities and banalities, no matter what culture, faith or disbelief we are talking about, we keep circling around the premonition of the idea of a monolith. It is not an idea, at least not clear enough to leave a trace in the historical sediment of time. Rather, it is the involuntary gesture of a hand touching something, wandering over an invisible but perceptibly smooth surface. So smooth that even the imagined touch of it begins to fascinate. The unintelligible ancient Latin word fascinans is still very much alive today. It has found many new functions, proving itself in areas as far apart as technology and intimacy. All of us have been fascinated by something. We can talk for hours (even on the phone) about our fascinations. Then we return to the same places, the same moments. Memory leads us back to our own traces, sometimes surprised to discover them again. We go round in circles, gliding over the surface of the past. After successive turns, we cease to distinguish it from the projections of the future. Our attention is held by a smoothness that becomes more and more perfect after each round. We are a nomadic and narrative species. We mix these qualities, turning them into each other in a hypnotic rhythm that leads us along the smooth again and again. It is amazing. It has to be smooth.

In 1533, the year in which Elizabeth I of the Tudor dynasty was born (it has been in the collection of the National Gallery in London since 1890), one of the most accurately described and analysed old paintings was painted. Every detail so precisely painted by Hans Holbein has been meticulously interpreted. And yet the meaning of the whole remains hidden from us. It is as if the meaning is hidden behind a thick patterned curtain, behind which the figures of self-confident ambassadors accustomed to rule are presented.

The year is 2024, and we know as much as we did five hundred years ago about matters of direct concern to everyone and as universal as life and death.
We are capable of changing the decorations, each successive epoch unravelling another carpet with its own pattern. We move away as much as we come closer to understanding what this procession of similar poses and gestures is all about.