Foligno, at the former Church of the Holy Trinity in Annunziata, until 16 April 2026, hosts Interregnum by Adrian Paci, an exhibition project reflecting on the relationship between memory, power, and representation. The exhibition focuses on a video work created in 2017, the core of the exhibition, presented in dialogue with the site’s permanent installation, Calamita Cosmica by Gino de Dominicis.

Through the editing of archival materials and official television footage from different geographical and historical contexts, including Albania, China, North Korea, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia, the work constructs a transnational and trans-historical staging of collective mourning, centred on the funeral ceremonies of twentieth-century communist leaders. All direct references to the deceased leaders are removed: coffins, bodies, and explicit symbols of power are absent. The focus shifts entirely to the people.

The images, dating from the 1920s to the 1980s, document national mourning rituals that marked the end of entire political eras. What emerges is an emotional chorus shaped by repeated gestures and codified postures, revealing the tension between individual experience and collective performance, between genuine grief and imposed ritual.

Interregnum is part of Adrian Paci’s biographical and artistic trajectory, shaped by his direct experience of the political transformations following the collapse of the Albanian communist regime, while extending beyond a national framework to address broader questions concerning collective memory and the role of media in shaping, preserving, and transmitting the past. The project evokes the idea of “interregnum” as a moment of suspension and crisis, in which the old order fades before a new one has emerged, turning memory into a site of confrontation between control and the potential for change.