A Sign in Space
installation, 2016

Commissioned for the New Realism exhibition at Science Park in Amsterdam, A Sign in Space is my second work inspired by Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics. The work reflects upon the process leading to the production of visual representations of cosmic phenomena. The images selected for the piece represent the centre of the Milky Way, first captured by the Swift satellite and then cleansed of defects caused by the satellite’s mechanical failures and degradation over time.

Here the images, meant to represent concrete celestial phenomena, yet cleansed of any sign of physical occurrence in time and of any spatial reference, are shown as exercise of pure mental abstraction, as windows into the void, with white signs floating onto it. The title of the work alludes to the almost surreal, yet distinctly human tension of finding one’s place within the infinity of the cosmos by tracing deliberate, yet meaningless, signs onto the void.