The idea of this project was born out of a very brief text by Pier Paolo Pasolini in which he writes about the crisis of rural populations, as they become urban centers. In the text, Pasolini talks about the transformation of peasants into laborers. Bearing this in mind, he alludes to fireflies and their extinction, imputable to the alteration of the environment. For indeed in said transformation the landscape was disrupted; great buildings and industrial working centers appeared. As a logical consequence, everything started revolving around production, great volumes, and time, all perfectly bounded to work.

Clearly, through this transformation, something happens to our relation with the horizon. Something happens to the placement of the gaze, an interruption occurs and shortens its path. Undoubtedly, the scale, volume, and mass of the bodies that shape the setting are also altered. The most ordinary things are subjected to change, and our viewpoint is relocated.

So, my first idea for the project was to saturate this old industrial warehouse with a rocky landscape, to draw stones using graphite and collect them to the point of pervasion, and to generate islands and routes for the viewer. After that, I thought about the opposite equation, that is, producing a great volume out of the most used material in this factory: cotton thread. For a long time, thread has been essential to my work. So have been stones. Much as is graphite. In the end, I changed my mind and decided to decrease the weight and increase the volume of the piece, to shift the body in order to achieve repetitive sequences capable of detonating differences and generating small accidents ... to affect a landscape that no longer occurs outwards but inwards (in space and also within oneself). I intend for the gaze to operate an inverse process that displays the gaps and fissures so that, in expanding our gaze, we are rendered able to see the other.

Once the sculpture loses its continuity, we are left solely with discontinuity, empty spaces, silences. Perhaps from here, from these spaces, we may be able to glimpse the place once inhabited by fireflies.

Luis Felipe Ortega

January, 2017