I recognize the place that I inhabit as a space constituted by layers of daily life in a city. By observing and reflecting on these latent layers, which can be symbolic or physical, I explore an expanded dimension of the territory.
Through research into digital and physical archives and direct observation, I approach the urban landscape, and discover the historical and symbolic traces of a city’s founding and growth. In this way, the search for the vestiges of place has led me to see the city as a terrestrial space that is related to social, architectural, historical and even celestial cartographies. Furthermore, I see these cartographies as astronomical events that influence the ways in which we use space. I am particularly interested in old maps – geographic and astronomical – since I conceive of them as windows to get closer to the past and to the ways in which different societies construct and represent their world and landscape.
I understand maps, commonly used for navigation and measurement, as devices through which we can approach unknown territory; a space that we contain in our eyes and our hands, but which we may never reach with our body. In this sense, the scientific image and measurement instruments are resources through which we seek to approach the complexity of our environment. Also, I have been interested in discovering the presence of the natural and primeval landscape, which is revealed through marks and signs present in the urban landscape – signals that show the passage of time and the transformation of territory.
One of the concepts that have become present in my work is “Terra Incognita”, which was used in ancient maps to indicate the limit of geographical knowledge. The use of this inscription makes me think of distant and immeasurable regions, unlikely places and theoretical spaces. In addition, it leads me to imagine the difficulty of making a map of an unknown territory in a historical moment in which discoveries were made through long expeditions. The use of the term "Terra incognita" disappeared from the maps during the 19th century, as the planet earth ceased to be a strange place for humans.
I wonder, what is our "Terra Incognita" today? What are those mysterious and unknown places? Under this concern, I focus my artistic practice as a cartography exercise of a territory that I will never be able to recognize through my body: the universe. I seek to create images and metaphors that relate our place on earth and how we perceive and interpret what we see far away in the sky.