Entre lo profundo y lo distante (...)

The project Entre lo profundo y lo distante (Between the deep and the distant), conceived specifically for the IVAM, takes as its starting point David Abram’s The spell of the sensuous, which – drawing on phenomenological philosophy and conceptions of time present in various Indigenous cosmologies – proposes that time is inscribed within the landscape. In Abram’s vision, past and future coexist within the present and are spatially situated: the past lies beneath layers of matter – strata of earth, coral rings, ancient zones of the brain – and upholds the present. The future, by contrast, rests on the horizon: a threshold linking the terrain we inhabit with what extends beyond, receding as we advance towards it.

From this idea, the lower installation explores forms of the past inscribed in space, invisible to experience, and invites visitors to enter an unknown territory. The work evokes a sense of interiority – cave, earth, body, underworld, or womb – arranging its elements so as to envelop the viewer, allowing them to move among layers reminiscent of tree rings or cave folds. At the centre of the space, the presence of a mythical serpent is suggested – an ancestral inhabitant of the subterranean imagination across multiple cultures.

On the upper floor, a metallic line traces the perimeter of the room like a horizon, almost within reach, and is interrupted by sculptures that alter its course. The installation enters into dialogue with the ceque system of the pre-Columbian Andean world – a network of sacred lines radiating from the centre of the city towards the horizon, connecting huacas (sacred places) and mapping a correspondence between space and time. Each huaca marked moments in the Inca calendar. In this sense, the interruptions that break the line evoke those huacas as temporal markers.

The two installations are linked by an intervention on the staircase, so that the ascent evokes the crossing of a threshold – the passage from one state to another. This vertical axis functions as a rupture in continuity, a ’now‘ that traverses layers of time. Between the Entre lo profundo y lo distante explores how time is anchored in the landscape, recognising that every geography is, in essence, temporal.