Apollo’s Tropic

Néphéli Barbas and Martin Herold explore architecture as a living archive: they interpret facades, ornaments, and traces of everyday use as places where time accumulates and rewrites itself. Their works—paintings, objects, and spatial installations—emerge through a process of give-and-take: the image responds to the object, the structure encounters its own disruption, and one approach triggers another. No form stabilizes permanently. The key to interpreting the exhibition is Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, not as a literary reference, but as a mode of movement through space: fragmentary, intermittent, constantly returning to places we have already seen but do not recognize. Apollo does not enter this world as a figure of harmony, but as a reminder that transformation need not mean loss—it can be a way to survive.