Twilight (2008-09)

by Carlos Irijalba

Twilight consists of the displacing of a floodlighting tower for a football camp, a space that is hyperdefined by and for spectacle, whose descriptive lighting presents the subject of its attention as the only one that exists. This tower has been transferred to one of Europe’s last forests, Irati, in the north of Navarre, creating a redefinition of the real as visible employing the language proper to spectacle. The project is about the way in which the West constructs a circuit of the real through light. Natural lighting provides a consistent space-time dimension, while the West’s approach to light, in contrast, goes beyond the manufacture of an eternal day to rupture structures and cycles towards the construction of an abstract medium that loses all relations except in relation to itself. Fire as the first artifice and, later, artificial light have symbolised the place of transformation. Spectacle has inherited the place and hypnotic qualities of fire and has marked out the plane of the visible so that it can be digested, transferring attention towards a series of pseudo-events. Representation of place is now insufficient. The project poses this installation as the n