chrysalis

With chrysalis, the BPS22 inaugurates a new summer event dedicated to its collections. Each year, a selection of works will emerge from the shadows of the storage rooms into the light of the museum, offering a renewed and singular perspective on the collection. This initial chapter draws inspiration from the Latin word chrysalis, denoting the cocooning stage – a state of latency in which matter prepares itself to be reborn in another form. The exhibition seizes this fragile instant of meta­mor­pho­sis, suspended between two shapes, two worlds, between what is no more and what is not yet – a moment in which reality holds its breath, when everything shifts without yet revealing itself.

The exhibition brings together instal­la­tions, sculptures, paintings, photographs and videos that capture this moment when things appear to falter, when certainties fracture, when forms are still searching for themselves. Between collapse and rebirth, the assembled works explore the invisible forces that weave through human lives: the systems that shape us, the narratives that mould us, and the silences that inhabit us. They are rooted in the real and its political ruptures, the intimate and its quiet resistances, nature and its scars, the imagination and its tears. Without imposing anything, they reveal what takes place in the interstices: silent movements, discreet trans­for­ma­tions, precarious balances. chrysalis thus proposes a sensory journey in which each work becomes a fragment of a present in constant reinvention.

Between hidden tensions, unfulfilled promises and unsuspected beauties, the exhibition plunges us into this phase of transition. As if, before our eyes, something were already in the process of reinventing itself. In the vast space of the Grande Halle, chrysalis becomes a metaphor for our world in perpetual mutation, in continual recon­fig­u­ra­tion, where instability has become the defining mark of our era – yet without ever giving way to despair