Beneath the Arches of Time: artist Leandro Erlich’s sand installation for UMoCA

The Argentina-based artist Leandro Erlich presents Sotto gli Archi del Tempo (Beneath the Arches of Time), a series of site-specific installations created for UMoCA – Under Museum of Contemporary Art in Colle di Val d'Elsa, conceived, curated and organised by Cai Guo-Qiang and Associazione Arte Continua as part of its ongoing Cities of the Future programme. The project, on view from April 11 – October 30, 2026, transforms the historic arches of the San Francesco bridge into an immersive public space where art and natural landscape converge through three art installations.

“Beneath the medieval arches of the San Francesco bridge, his three monumental sand-sculpted installations transform public space into an ephemeral landscape reflecting on the nature of heritage, its vulnerability and the collective responsibility of memory,” Galleria Continua shares in the official release.

Of the three installations, the first presents a monumental hourglass resting on a dune, evoking the immeasurable nature of time. In the second, sand is transformed into a miniature topography of Colle di Val d'Elsa, depicting the town itself as a fleeting landscape made from nature itself. “The sandcastle—symbol of childhood imagination, collective play and ephemeral beauty—becomes here also a warning about the fragility of things, erosion, and the vanity of permanence,” the art gallery explains. The final installation assembles architectural landmarks—from Brunelleschi's Dome and the Parthenon to a Mayan pyramid and Notre-Dame—into a single imagined geography, highlighting both the universality and vulnerability of human civilisation.

“Within this delicate landscape, heritage reveals its deepest nature: not eternal stone, but a fragile material—like sand—held together by the responsibility of those who care for it,” the contemporary art gallery notes.

For the contemporary artist, sand is a metaphor for the human condition: a material that embodies both creation and inevitable disappearance. Through these ephemeral forms, Sotto gli Archi del Tempo invites visitors to reconsider the concepts of permanence and impermanence. "Every form built with sand seems to contain, from the very beginning, the certainty of its own disappearance," Erlich says in the official release. "And yet it is precisely in that act of building—however precarious and fleeting—that something profoundly human is revealed."

“The project is realised under the patronage of the Tuscany Region, Colle di Val d’Elsa, Poggibonsi and San Gimignano, as part of the candidacy of Colle Val d’Elsa for Italian Capital of Culture 2028, with the support of sponsors Giannoni e Santoni, Carlo Fantacci e Associati, and Azienda Agricola la Torre di Ananìa Luigi Antonio,” Galleria Continua notes.