The work Y los ritos son en el tiempo lo que la morada es en el espacio (And rites are to time what dwellings are to space) is presented as a body in transit, articulating a fundamental dialectic between the natural and the constructed. Its intentionally ambiguous design—oscillating between the forms of an architectural dome, a telluric volcano, and an organic tuber—destabilises the viewer’s gaze. This formal ambiguity turns the object not only into a sculptural piece, but also into an area of perceptual experimentation that demands a constant renegotiation of categorisation.

Inside this structure, the work is transformed into a refuge and a sensitive laboratory. The space shelters an ecosystem of inherited plants, originating from the artist’s grandmother, mother, and friends. This choice is not ornamental; these plants inject a layer of affective and biological memory that politicises the concept of inheritance. The space becomes a territory of affections where plant life operates as a living archive of family and community ties.

There is a hidden garden inside. A plot of mud that girdles life, that surrounds and rises towards a slice of exact and contained sky. Everything that nests there has signs of having inhabited another place with an atavistic memory that reveals a time that looks less and less like the one we inhabit.

The work functions as a fictional landscape that contains within itself its own origin and possible end. In doing so, it questions the hegemonic scales from which the world is perceived: the large scale of monumental architecture and the capitalist landscape is confronted by the intimate and temporal scale of plant life and affection. It is a rite of containment and affirmation that uses the small and vulnerable to rewrite the narrative of permanence and resistance.

Victor Lopez Zumelzu