Fragments Before Midnight collapses millennia of human anxiety into the flicker of a smartwatch screen. A generic device glows on the wall, its face initially displaying the banal present: *10:00, June 11th, 2024*. As the camera zooms inward, fragmented texts materialize—telegrams from antiquity reincarnated as digital notifications. These are cuneiform inscriptions from civilizations on the brink of collapse, now pulsing across a wearable screen: Damuzi’s primal dream of cyclical harvest and decay; Inana’s divine reply; the Akkadian lament blaming gods for their empire’s ruin.

The work hinges on dissonance. Scientific hindsight reveals the Akkadian “curse” as climate catastrophe—a 4,200-year-old drought—yet their poetic despair mirrors our own era’s paralysis between myth and agency. The watch, a symbol of hyper-connected modernity, becomes a palimpsest: its messages oscillate between fatalism (“divine retribution”) and urgency (“causes we know, magnitude we determine”).

Technically austere yet conceptually dense, Fragments Before Midnight amplifies the series’ interrogation of disaster narratives. The camera’s clinical focus on the screen—a portal between ancient trauma and algorithmic immediacy—mirrors how we now “read” crisis: through scrolls of data and doom.

Part of El cielo cayendo (Under the Falling Sky), this work reframes apocalypse as a recurring language, urging us to decode its patterns—not as prophecy, but as a mirror to our capacity for reinvention.