BAGHERA UNIVERSE is the first universe I created — in collaboration with artist Gessica Maio. An alternative reality, set in the near future, where an ecological collapse has wiped out 99% of the population. The survivors now live in a Megalo-Paul, a world-city governed by an Artificial Intelligence named Paul Lia. Cut off from all relationship with nature — which has become the enemy and been held responsible for extinction — the inhabitants lead a soft and sterile existence: without work, without effort, immersed in continuous consumption.
But Baghera is not limited to this city. It's a universe-multiverse, composed of parallel worlds, alternative dimensions, interconnected realities. Journeys, shifts, ruptures open passages between these spaces. Each world explores a different facet of the same system in crisis — technological, ecological, spiritual — and all are connected by the same underground fabric, the same fictional DNA.
Baghera Universe deliberately adopts an accessible fictional aesthetic, close to collective imaginaries from popular science fiction. This initial readability is not a compromise, but a hospitality strategy. It allows for the suspension of exclusion reflexes often associated with conceptual art, by offering a first layer of narrative, immediately graspable, which defuses resistance. The work does not reveal itself all at once, it opens progressively: the viewer is invited to enter through fiction, before being led, almost imperceptibly, toward more symbolic, critical, even disconcerting levels of reading. It is in this displacement — from the familiar to discomfort, from the imaginary to thought — that the heart of my approach plays out. Fiction thus becomes a vector of soft destabilization, a medium of latent thought.
Baghera constitutes the narrative and symbolic foundation of my work. Many of my artworks are derived from or inspired by it — whether they extend this imaginary or propose new incarnations of it.
mockup realised by Gessica Maio - from here website
