X
2021
Natural
Magic
FILM
The Sun is Counting
the Earth’s Rotations
The Sun is Counting the Earth’s Rotations is not, to me, just a film. It is a place I built — a stage that unfolds as an experiment, where time, architecture, and whoever enters drift together into a shared dream.
I filmed it inside Endless Theatre, an installation that was first a real playground, activated by children. In that space, textiles, reflections, and bodies became part of a carousel of mirrors, where the boundaries between audience and actor, costume and set, began to blur.
TI have always been drawn to undoing the traditional structure of theatre. Here, the familiar dichotomies —stage and spectator, figure and background— dissolve. What opens is a liminal space, a “third space” in which the viewer is no longer outside, but participating, generating meaning.
In the editing, I combined 16mm film with 4K digital video. These two gazes —one tactile and naïve, the other sharp and technological— coexist like a binocular vision. I thought of dreams: their layers, their repetitions, the way time folds and stretches inside them.
Characters, sets, and movements keep changing. I let myself be guided by certain principles of psychoanalysis. Especially by Freud’s diagrams in The Interpretation of Dreams, which I used as a kind of hidden map for the film’s structure. The images work as bridges between the visible and the latent, between what is spoken and what is dreamed.
In the end, The Sun is Counting the Earth’s Rotations is this: an endless staged essay. A space to test other ways of seeing, where body, image, and architecture share a small cosmos — always open to multiple readings.
The Sun is Counting the Earth’s
Rotations
2022
HD & 16mm video
09:51
Installation view
at MNCARS
Reflective curved panels multiply the projection, deforming the image as the viewer moves.
Inspired by Etel Adnan’s The Arab Apocalypse, the film places the Sun at the centre of a new constructed cosmos.
It was filmed inside the site-specific installation Endless Theatre (Matadero Madrid, 2019). The stage was originally conceived as a playground, activated by children before the filming process.
16mm film and 4K digital footage alternate, creating a binocular vision between analogue and digital.
Cosmic cycles of light and shadow are mirrored by the tactile softness of 16mm analog film, evoking a childlike point of view.
The curved panels work as both projection surface and optical device.
FILM
Hearing Forms
In Hearing Forms I wanted sound to become visible. In front of me, a myriad of particles tremble in the air, casting fleeting flashes of light as they gather into clouds that shift shape, dissolve, and form again.
This movement grows out of a wave phenomenon. On a vibrating surface —a Chladni Plate I built by hand with a steel sheet, bolts, pigments, and an old subwoofer— sound frequencies turn into figures. A hidden mechanism translates sound into motion, and in that translation a visual language appears, one tied to the mechanics of fluids and the dynamics of particles.
I worked with fragments of the soundtrack from The Sun is Counting the Earth’s Rotations, selecting passages that moved rapidly between high and low frequencies. I was looking for tones that could draw clearly on the dust. The particles danced, obeying the rhythm of what cannot be seen.
On this floating screen, bodies seem to disintegrate into fine matter, scattering into an iridescent veil of dust. It feels as if the solid becomes atmosphere, as if vibration becomes image.
What I seek is a translation between worlds: from a sonic language —a song of frequencies— to a visual one, shifting and in constant dialogue with its source. In that exchange, hidden languages emerge, those we do not usually see. Animated by sound waves, abstract forms cross the surface, leaping from the figurative to the geometric and then into pure abstraction. Each figure is ephemeral, but leaves a trace: an echo inscribed in the eye, like a score for the invisible.
2021
16mm video
In-camera
editing
11:13
The process translates acoustic information into visual form, illustrating the physical behavior of matter under wave phenomena.
Particles move into distinct shapes depending on the tone produced.
This setup transforms sound waves into visible patterns.
Fine particles on the plate respond to vibrations, arranging themselves into geometric and fluid patterns that shift with changes in sound and tone.
Although Hearing Forms has been shown in a more orthodox way as a 16mm projection, the piece was conceived specifically for the Vaulted Room at the Museo Reina Sofía, a subterranean space that invites a shift in perception. Once a water cistern, the space no longer carries water, but light. It travels from one room to another through the same opening that once connected the tanks. What seems like a simple gesture is, in reality, a highly precise setup — the result of extensive optical calculations developed in collaboration with specialised engineers.
The beam from the 16mm projector passes through a sequence of mirrors and reaches a large convex mirror suspended in the centre of the room —a new sun— which amplifies the image before it is cast onto a horizontal screen above the audience. The light floats, bends, and curves. It works like a magic trick. But, as Roger Caillois reminded Breton, even magic requires deep knowledge. This installation is, for me, a contemporary adaptation of the magic lantern: a choreography between architecture, optics, and projection that transforms the space into an optical illusion.
Conceptual diagram showing the path of the light beam as it travels through mirrors across the Vaulted Room of the Museo Reina Sofía.
A sequence of angled mirrors redirects the 16mm beam across the space.
A large convex mirror acts as a new sun, amplifying the projection.
The installation reimagines the magic lantern as a contemporary optical device.
The horizontal screen is suspended above the audience, like a floating sky.
FILM
Breathings of the
Moon
(in collaboration with Diego Delas)
Breathings of the Moon, part of the performance with the same name, shows an expedition into
the underwater worlds of the Venice Lagoon and its canals. Rooted in the idea of a magical
trick, it follows the logic of amusement pre-scientific artefacts that looked at the world
and its different scales with eyes anew. Recognizing the water through an instrument and
resonating with the canal.
Breathings of the Moon
2022
HD & 16mm
video
21:30
PERFORMANCE
Breathings of the
Moon
(in collaboration with Diego Delas)
Breathings of the Moon functions as both performance and expedition into the underwater
worlds of the Venice Lagoon and its canals. Structured as a liturgy of quasi-theatrical
progressive steps to be taken: to hold the hand of the rower (eternal storyteller), to
descend into a vessel, to enter the belly of a quasi-fish and to get used to the dark.
Looking into the water through an instrument, resonating with the rower, lagoon rhythms,
embodying a multiplicity of tidal patterns, to come back anew, return changed, amused and
amazed, disembarking elsewhere, close, but elsewhere, perhaps on a much more complex realm.
Breathings of the
Moon
2022
Performance
Video viewing through a periscope in
a Venice gondola
SCULPTURES
Red Giant
Red Giant are a sort of formally semi-circular iron plates that, in turn, work as a fan when
passing. They support, right in their centre, a microcosm reminiscent of a
large nebula. Like in astrophysics is often stated, we are indeed stardust and precisely
here a kind of stellar wind surfaces in an odd game of scale and weights. The mysterious
dance that Leonor Serrano Rivas invites us to experience introduces different registers
ranging from the handmade to the technological and implying a stealthy leap of scales from
the micro to the macro. And, this one, reveals what defines serendipity, and that is that in
the construction of knowledge rests the accident, the chance beyond the discovery or
conscious search.
Laura Vallés Vílchez, Londres
Febrero 2022
Red Giant nº 1
2022
Sculpture
Iron,
thread and glass
329 x 120 x 1 cm
Red Giant nº 2
2022
Sculpture
Iron,
thread and glass
329 x 120 x 1 cm
Red Giant nº 3
2022
Sculpture
Iron,
thread and glass
329 x 75 x 1 cm
Red Giant nº 4
2022
Sculpture
Iron,
thread and glass
329 x 75 x 1 cm
Stardust
Stardust is a series of crystals painted with metals and nitrates at high temperatures.
These plates are placed facing each other creating a faceted polyhedron,
acting as a galaxy of possible worlds. Suspended by fine threads, this series of world
crystals reminds us of the fragility with which a cosmos is sustained while blowing a cosmic
wind that seems to go through everything: earth, man, animal and universe. A cosmos hanging
by a thread, a world made of dust.
Stardust
2022
11 x 7 x 0,2cm
Glass,
colour glass, silver nitrates and silicates.
Tables of the Moon
Tables of the Moon takes its name from the moon boards of E.W. Brown, who tried to
synthesise the information on the moon. Brown, who tried to symphonize the
movements and rotations of the moon on tablets, reduced them to basic representations
written down on cardboard, in a rather abstract way.
Our loom would then be situated between mind and hand, reason and memory: it relates to the
translation of music onto punched cards, and then creating a pattern that can finally be
inhabited, stepped on, touched, looked at, and performed through music.
Tables of the Moon
2022
Variable
measures
Dyed combed cotton and viscose rayon
Jacquard weavings
made out of music box scores
2022
Variable measures
Punched
cards
Cardboard punched cards that contain the music track of the
film.
Percussion cymbals with music boxes made out of
the score of the film soundtrack.
Sound Design:
Daniel
Goddard
Georgie Goddard
2022
Variable measures
Music boxes
TAPESTRY
Fictional
conversations between an Astronomer and an Astrologist
Building on a previous series of works (Stars’ Dust) -small pieces of glass in which
silicates and other chemical elements are burnt in the kiln, replicating a process similar
to that undergone by stars at birth - Nubulosa Clouds (2023) is the first textile piece from
a larger serie in which the fusing glass is transformed into a negative version, this time
textile. In this way the white glass becomes black welf, the copper nitrate that makes up
the reds becomes blue warp, and so they become more similar to what would be a vision of the
cosmos. Afterwards, these images have been given to an astronomer and an astrologer in order
to interpret them as if they were visions of the universe or astrological charts
respectively. Thus, a haphazard - but also bordering on the alchemical - process of
constructing an image (Star Dust, 2022) takes a new twist and pretends to be an agent with
its own entity to be interpreted where scientific and pseudo-scientific knowledge orbit at
the same level.
Nebulosa Clouds
2023
Textile (rayon,
viscose, cotton warpo) and brass
94x62x40 cm
Violent Birth of the Stars
2023
Textile
(rayon, viscose, cotton warpo) and brass
94x60x40 cm
Snow Moon
2023
Textile (rayon, viscose,
cotton warpo) and brass
94x62x40 cm