Fools’ Paradise echoes forcefully when we consider the collective response to climate change. Rather than confronting the irreversible nature of the crisis, we have chosen to uphold the fiction of a stable order. This denial is not naïve; it operates as a mechanism of power that guarantees the continuity of an economic and political model in which the dynamics of capital remain intact.

The reshaping of geographic space also stems from these dynamics. Climate change is not a natural accident, but rather the spatial expression of structural inequalities, where entire regions are sacrificed to uphold the promise of prosperity elsewhere. Within this context, paradise becomes the image of a geopolitics of self-deception. Centers of power remain absorbed in an illusion of continuity, while the peripheries irreversibly surrender land and water. A perfect world for the privileged—who are, at the same time, its primary destroyers.

At the heart of the exhibition lies a fractured political map of the 195 UN-recognized countries, modeled in recycled clay, coated with tar, and exposed to fire. A cracked, blackened atlas, covered with carbonized roses. Tar and fire give material density to the metaphor, evoking the extractive and energy dynamics that have precipitated climate collapse. And the surface—once vegetal wealth, now residue—confronts the viewer with catastrophe, with the certainty that time has run out.

Four nations refused to sign the 2015 Paris Agreement—United States, Iran, Yemen, and Libya—whose aim was “to hold the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C” (UNFCCC, 2015). The case of the United States reveals the fragility of climate consensus: it signed the agreement in 2016, withdrew in 2020, rejoined in 2021, and in 2025 once again announced its departure—a posture that signals environmental commitment as an electoral issue rather than a State policy. Iran never signed due to international sanctions, while Libya and Yemen remain on the margins, trapped in internal conflicts that prevent them from assuming multilateral commitments. By isolating them, or positioning them outside the logic of the map, Arias turns them into specters. Invisible in the exhibition, they haunt the space from the shadows.

The second core of the exhibition shifts attention to water. The tapestries designed by Fernando and woven by Kashmiri artisans—a region marked both by the floods of the Jhelum River and by the dispute between India and Pakistan over water resources—were created from digital image banks. The formal operation translates the ephemeral immediacy of the digital into surfaces that confer weight and texture. In the form of ripples or floods, water emerges in the textile weave as a vital force and, at the same time, a destructive one.

The inclusion of 44 islands in ceramic fragments scattered across the floor radicalizes this reflection further. The fragility of the UN-recognized island states, now threatened by rising sea levels, is made explicit in pieces that force the viewer to watch their step. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned that even with a limited increase of 1.5°C, some low-lying island ecosystems face a very high risk of irreversible loss (IPCC, AR6 Synthesis Report, 2023). In physical terms, the thermal expansion of the ocean and the melting of Greenland and West Antarctica generate coastal erosion and salinization of aquifers.

The exhibition grants no space for optimism. It offers neither promise nor consolation. It confronts the viewer with the evidence that the devices of modernity do not provide a possibility of stability and instead reiterates what many scientists have warned: there are no clear solutions to reverse climate change or its fatality. If any truth remains, it is that we inhabit the ruins of a paradise—and the cost of sustaining this illusion is immeasurable.