PAX ROMANA
2026
Neon, acrylic, laurel branches, deconstructed flag, cotton, PANTONE-11-4201 (Cloud Dancer, 2026 Colour of the Year
Neon Fabrication: David Cooper, Neon Nostalgia
Acrylic Etching: Newy Laser and Graphics
Etched Text: Francesco Petrarch, Epistolae Metricae 3.33
Translation by: Robert Cowan, Associate Professor of Classics, University of Sydney
DOCUMENTATION BY DOCUmenT PHOTOGRAPHY
“America is New Rome”
“X is our Colosseum”
“We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.”
— Elon Musk
Pax Romana — a 200-year period of hostile peace and imperial primacy — came to an end with the accession of Commodus, a chaotic leader whose self-aggrandisement and contempt for political institutions plunged the Empire into severe political, economic and military crises. While its end did not topple the Empire itself, it set Rome on an irrecoverable trajectory, transforming it, as Cassius Dio observed, “from a kingdom of gold to one of rust and iron.”
More than a thousand years later, poet Francesco Petrarch would look back and lament the long decline he believed had come to define his own era: a dark age, a middle time — absent of past virtues, consumed by "fortune, pleasure [and] dishonour,” with only the hope of better days he would not live to see (and yet still planted seeds for).
When Pantone introduced PANTONE 11-4201 (Cloud Dancer) as its 2026 Colour of the Year, the off-white swatch registered as a sign of our times: a landlord special; a recession indicator; a suitable backdrop for indifference to genocide. An empire at the end of its epoch, verging on social, political and ecological collapse.
As the tech-right invokes Ancient Rome as a proxy for power and authority — while casually acknowledging that they might just end humanity — this work considers what it is to live through an end. Witness to an inflection point in which falling and rising trajectories pass through each other like waves travelling in opposing phase, the ending of one time presages the beginning of another.