The work Future is a faded song by Anri Sala offers an immersive experience where visitors are invited to explore the depths of the Ikurado cave, conducted by the sound and light embodiment of two intertwined breaths. The cave is illuminated in rhythm with these two circular breaths, casting light onto stalactites and stalagmites whose evolving shapes call to mind the frozen waveforms of sound mutations. Initially, the duration of each breath corresponds to the respective volumes occupied by the bodies of two victims of the Pompeii eruption (79AD), revealed during excavations in 2017. 

From the onset, as the visitors enter the Ikurado cave, the breaths start to trigger musical sounds. Initially, they resonate with the notes of a double flute (aulos in Greek), also unearthed during the Pompeii excavations, allowing this foregone instrument that had remained silent for millennia—to echo once again. As the visitors delve further into the cave, the sounds of the aulos give way to the tunes of modern wind instruments, first clarinet and later saxophone, as if the ancient sounds emancipate themselves with each step deeper into the cave.

Closer to the surface, as the journey nears its end, visitors catch sight of a timeworn turntable floating weightlessly in an abandoned space station, shimmering like a buried relic waiting to be uncovered. It is tethered only by its electrical cord, endlessly playing a record of Messiaen’s “Abyss of the Birds” (1941).

In this enigmatic setting, visitors find themselves at the heart of an experience that unites past and future in a sonic and visual transformation, where breath and light serve as interconnected lifelines linking the ancestral depths of the Earth with a prospective postapocalyptic event, where a vinyl spins eternally above its deserted skies.