24 April - 24 May 2026
The emperor read it twice and paled. He called for his council.
The astrologers first denied the event, and later confirmed it: the moon, home of the rabbit who ground the elixir of life, was now a smooth yellow disc, devoid of memory.
The earth, an imperfect mirror, imitated this loss. It withheld the seed, stopped the flow of women’s blood, and the calendar was lost. Fertility, the most discreet form of magic, ceased. Among the elders, there was only confusion. It was the Empress who said “the rabbit on the moon had not disappeared, but that something on earth had stopped responding to it.”
Absurd and terrible remedies were proposed: murdering the Pythia, firing a cannon at the moon, or forbidding the birth of new rabbits on earth (remedies—cruel, foolish things). In the end, fearing the void, they invented a double: a giant rabbit made of a new material resistant to everything, but fire.
For a time, everything seemed to return to normal. The Rabbit God was made of the new material, and people began to carry talismans for blessings of the immortal rabbit.
One day, lost in the archives of history, the talisman rabbits began to reproduce uncontrollably: two, four, eight, sixteen... At first, it was a sign of luck, then the calculations began, then the invasion. The rabbits covered houses, roads, rivers, temples, and fields, as if obeying an evil secret law of fertility.
Men and women tried to destroy them: they crushed them, they threw them to the sea, they buried them. Nothing stopped their numbers. A perfect plague. In the end, the war was lost. Defeated, the people climbed into the trees. Not by decree, but by retreat. Living in the trees changed something in everyone: the emperor fell silent. The empress wept day and night.
After many silent moons, when the wise council ran out of words, someone said to the others “We must burn everything, not as punishment but out of necessity; we must make a fire that would warm the moon, so that the moon could see us again.” Though burning sacred icons was a highly profane taboo, nobody contradicted him.
That night, they ordered the remaining wood to be cut and a bonfire to be built that could touch the sky. When it ignited, the pyre was so vast that, for all of them it took time to comprehend its magnitude. For seven days, the world became hell: a green fire covered everything. The acrid blue smoke made the air unbreathable.
The flames did not discriminate: the emperor died on the second day. The empress was never found. Many fell silently. Others never came down from the trees. When the fire ended, no kingdom remained—only ash. The few who survived walked across it without speaking. There were no orders left to give.
From the ash, small rabbits leaped, and with each leap, a blue flower bloomed. There were many rabbits and many flowers.
“Ashes are the best soil”. Said a voice.
No one celebrated.
It was then that a child looked at the rabbits and the flowers and asked
“Are the rabbits and the flowers real?”
Someone answered
“We do not know. But it is the only thing we have.”
- David Cendales Jerez
Exhibition made possible with support from Rådet for Visuel Kunst, Grosserer L.F. Foghts Fond & Statens Værksteder.