Starting from a reflection on vanitas as a pictorial genre, Giovanfrancesco Giannini, Fabio Novembrini and Roberta Racis decline the iconography of vanity in the contemporary in relation to the macro theme of the crisis of our time. In an imaginary Eden, archetypal figures are lost in themselves and, through gloomy and deviant atmospheres, they mark the inexorability of a funereal, dying time. Violence, death and the ephemeral nature of life and youth are arranged in iconic compositions that emerge from the darkness of the background. The live filmed images are dotted with cut flowers and fruit, candles and hourglasses that allude to human finitude, to a perishing reality and history. The rhythm with which the still lifes are composed to be exhibited, zoomed in, foregrounded and then undone marks a catabasis in which the body becomes a thing among other things. Restlessness, crisis of thought, emptiness of meaning: vanity as the law of the world. But in the warning of death, there is a hymn to life that speaks of an indissoluble combination: there can be no future without the death of the world as we have known it until now.