Metanoia III, ‘saturated solitude’

In recent decades, events of destruction, natural collapse, and systemic failure across social, political, and economic spheres have dominated the public arena. On one hand, we have witnessed an exponential rise in death – at least how we perceive it – fuelled by armed conflicts, nuclear tensions, global pandemics, and migration crises. On the other hand, neoliberal economies swing between financial crashes and speculative bubbles, while assaults on democratic institutions contribute to an increasingly chaotic social landscape. Simultaneously, accelerating climate change and environmental degradation have amplified warnings that the window for action is rapidly narrowing. As we enter the era of Anthropocene extinction, marked by the breakdown of social and natural ecosystems, mass biodiversity loss, and the depletion of critical resources, humanity is also confronted with the precarity of its own existence and the looming spectre of collective extinction. The ongoing curatorial project Metanoia equates these macro-scale conditions. Taking it’s title from the Ancient Greek word metanoia — understood as a radical change of one’s thought — the project aims to foster dialogue between practices, entities, concepts, and perspectives that are diverse and at times paradoxical. It always seeks to uncover hidden lines of continuity and tension, while speculatively generating new ways of thinking and relating. This third iteration brings together the work of Adriana João, Bruno Silva, Di Lança Branco, Mette Rasmussen, Nicky Sparre-Ulrich, and Silas Inoue, marking the first chapter of a twopart exhibition, beginning in Nexø, on the Danish island of Bornholm, and continuing in Lisbon, Portugal, in early 2026. Unfolding across distinct geographies and temporalities, Metanoia III, ‘saturated solitude’ delves into themes that are central to the scope of the Metanoia project – extinction, decay, death, and how time passes – interweaving global and planetary collapse with local history and personal artistic approaches. From the exhaustion of natural ecosystems to the erosion of rural and urban identities, to the disappearance of cultural narratives; each work radiates a particular sense of solitude, resonating with SOLs’ islandness, the artists’ individual backgrounds, and the growing solitude of contemporary life. Yet this solitude is not merely a symptom. It implies a state of profound immersion in aloneness, not as the simple absence of others, but as an intense absorption in one’s inner world. Saturated solitude imbued with reflection, introspection, and emotional density, soaked in memory, loss, desire, refusal, and speculation. Rather than an emptiness, it becomes a thick terrain of meaning, as a mode of attention and situated knowledge and awareness. A space where these artists engage deeply with notions of place, body, history, and self.