The Last Night of Pompeii

Model theatre, maple wood, looped video [need duration], sugar sculptures
[need dimensions]
2026

Thinking about the Last Days of Pompeii, the eponymous 1926 film and imagining the last night of Pompeii, in the manner of the 1001 Nights where each night is potentially a final one. With Pompeii there is always a before and an after that is implied. A looped pyrodrama set in Pompeii’s Temple of Isis as wooden model theatre serves as a reminder of the cataclysmic event. I imagined animating Sir John Soane’s architectural models as paper toy theatre plays like the juvenile dramas so beloved of Victorian children. Soane was greatly inspired by Pompeii during the era of the Grand Tour. The Temple of Isis, transformed into a stage, becomes the focus and setting for an imaginary play. Figure-like sugar sculptures are reminiscent of the high heat of the volcano and ash that crystallised the city and preserved it in time; they are also suggestive of the casts of the poor victims. Sugar glass was also used in early filmmaking as substitutes for real glass breakages. The fragility of sugar and the feeling of teetering on the edge of disaster is omnipresent throughout the early film The Last Days of Pompeii. We all know the story of what happened at Pompeii: a great tragedy that also became history and memory. My ongoing work with the Nights led to an interest in ‘the night before’ and tension as dramatic irony. In the Nights the lowly female slave is often the heroic protagonist who saves the day and the figure of Nydia, the female slave in Last Days, similarly saves the main characters by rescuing them on an escape boat, sacrificing herself in the process.