Once called Vasio Vocontiorum, Vaison-la-Romaine was a bustling Roman settlement and the capital of the Vocontii. In the lower town, you find the remains of Roman civilization: mosaics, columns, statues, thermal baths, a bridge, and the remnants of an imposing amphitheater. These ruins are so embedded in the landscape that they become part of daily life, blending past and present in a way that leaves a lasting impression on anyone who visits.
Perched on a hill above, the upper town feels like an entirely different world—a labyrinth of cobbled streets leading to a medieval castle and a cathedral looming over the valley below. The high town has always felt like a portal to another time, where stone walls and narrow streets create an atmosphere of mystery and intrigue (especially at night).
These two distinct periods—Roman antiquity and the medieval era—imbued my childhood with a certain fascination for artifacts, relics, and remnants from ages past. The beauty of those stone structures still captivates me to this day. As a child, I would spend hours designing intricate mazes, imagining stories and minotaurs set within those ancient stones.
It would seem that a specific behavioral loop in elementary school is at the origin of the biological core of my project.
I don't really remember it, but according to my mother: when I was in first grade, I would intentionally misbehave in order to be sent to the school director's office. Think of it as an access strategy: the director maintained a small collection of biological specimens preserved in formaldehyde, jars of suspended life lining on his shelves.
Apparently I really loved that room. I would spend my time staring at those suspended forms—life frozen in liquid, separated from the world by glass, perfectly preserved. Looking back, the correlation is certainly uncosious, yet absolute. The Roman ruins taught me about Structure and Time. The director's office taught me about Containment and Preservation.
If Vaison provided the skeleton and the school office the biological core, then a VHS received at age ten inspired the Neural Network.
A VHS copy of Akira... What a cognitive shock! It definitelly pulled me away from mainstream media frequencies, and injected a new aesthetic into my "ancient" world: Cyberpunk, and its raw, dystopian perspectives. Later, Ghost in the Shell delivered a second axiom that shattered the physical boundaries of my small provincial town: "The Net is vast and infinite." While my physical surroundings spoke of history and stone, these works spoke of the future and fluidity. More and more signals came to harden this interest: Blade Runner, Neuromancer, Snowcrash, OEDO 808, Bubblegum Crisis, and of course later on, Matrix. Through them, I acquired the operating systems of a postmodern world—Donna Haraway’s cyborg manifesto, Mark Fisher’s capitalist realism, and Foucault’s panopticism. This was the final layer: the understanding that technology, identity, and society are fluid, mergeable entities.
I believe my work is the synthesis of these three early imprints: the Ancient (Ruins), the Preserved (Specimens), and the Speculative (Cyberpunk). The Arkhorin Lore is an ongoing meta-project that aims are merging three different creative streams into a single coherent narrative.
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The image illustrating this post is a funeral stone shaped like a Roman tragic mask, one of many fascinating steles displayed at the museum in Vaison-la-Romaine. This relic has always captivated me. One day, I plan to create a 3D model of it, and integrate it somehow into my own work. That would be the perfect homage to my hometown's continuous influence.
