Diluvium & Undae

On 14 September 2026, Pope Leo XIV inaugurated AQVA, the opening chapter of Catastrophe and Wonder, the Library’s new five-year exhibition cycle. JR was invited to create a site-specific installation, the first artwork ever commissioned for the Library’s exterior.

The piece, called DILUVIUM, takes a single engraving designed by Gustave Doré in 1866 to illustrate the Great Flood and enlarges it to the scale of the building, directly onto the Library’s 16th-century facade.

In the story it comes from, the Flood is both catastrophe and a fresh start. Not everything survives, but what does carries the story forward. A library does the same, more slowly: it gathers fragments of the world and carries them past time and oblivion. Here, the wave evokes a real fear: water undoing, in a single afternoon, what the Library has spent five centuries trying to protect.

For JR, this wave represents many things: climate change, the pace of artificial intelligence, an unpredictable future. Frozen on the facade for the length of the exhibition, the wave holds still long enough to be looked at. Not everything crosses the storm. So the work asks: what do we choose to carry forward?

“A lot of my work is about creating bridges. Between institutions, between fear and hope, between old architecture and an impermanent wave.” — JR

JR’s previous work, La Caverne du Pont Neuf in Paris, transformed the city’s oldest bridge into an immersive cave. At the Vatican, where the Pope’s own title, pontifex, means bridge-builder, JR returns to bridges.