On January 1, 2024, the 7.5-magnitude earthquake that struck the Noto Peninsula shook the neighboring city of Kanazawa, damaging the glass ceiling panels in the galleries at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art. This influenced Argentinian sculptor Adrián Villar Rojas’s plans for a newly commissioned artwork for the museum’s group exhibition “Dancing with All: The Ecology of Empathy.” With the ceiling pared back to exposed concrete and fluorescent tubes as a temporary repair, Villar Rojas masked the empty space with The Theater of Disappearance (2017), a ten-meter reproduction of the central figure in the Renaissance painting Madonna del Parto (c. 1460) by Piero della Francesca. The giant figure in a blue robe, the protector of pregnant women, signified by the position of her hand on her protruding belly, represents the union of worldly and divine conception, birthing the paradoxical figure of Jesus Christ—both God and man.