Santiago Díaz Escamilla

An Endless Opaque (I Threw My Head Back and Looked Upside Down)

2024

Eggs; Digital print on Fabriano Schizzi paper; Painted door frames; Wooden bench; Digital print on Figura Sketch paper; Vinyl wall text

This work grows out of aimless walks and chance encounters along the way. In Bogotá, I observe great thrushes—black birds with yellow beaks. Seeing them often raises a persistent question: Is the feathered animal I see in the window today the same one I encountered weeks ago? Is one bird all birds?

Later, in Oslo, the city brings other species. No longer thrushes, but hooded crows. The walks continue, as do the sightings. I feel the need to photograph them. One day, I go to a park where I have noticed they gather and follow them with a film camera. When the roll is developed, it comes out completely blank.

During that same period, someone leaves books in a hallway of the building where I live, free for the taking. Among them is The Birds by Aristophanes.

Paths. Questions that remain open. At another point, I read an article that mentions an engraving by Robert Fludd, a physician and mystic philosopher, published in Utriusque Cosmi historia (1617–1621) (“History of the Two Worlds”: the macrocosm of the universe and the microcosm of human life).

The engraving shows a black field bounded by a square, each of whose four sides bears the inscription Et sic in infinitum: “and so on to infinity.” The border fixes a limit; the phrase, the limitless. The blank roll records an absence where the image of a bird was expected.

The figure of the egg emerges from the birds. In the course of the investigation, its resonance also appears in the figure of the cosmic egg in various cosmogonies and in the cosmological model of the Big Bang, the “primeval atom” proposed by Georges Lemaître in 1931. This links the birds to Fludd and to the universe. Two questions remain at stake: the absence of an image when the image does not exist, and the void as that which precedes all form.

These questions take form in the installation, which unfolds in two adjacent rooms of the building, located in facing twin wings, with contrasting light conditions: one receives natural light; the other, penumbra. In the bright room, a black egg; in the dim room, a white one. Both at the same height, in the same place in each room, resting on the edge of a small piece of wood fixed to the wall, in a precarious balance between imminence and stillness. The support beneath the black egg is white; beneath the white egg, black.

Between the rooms, the painted doorframes mark the threshold and the passage between light conditions. Language appears in three forms. In the bright room, a brief text invites one to imagine the complete inversion: that the room where the visitor stands is completely black, while the room they are about to enter is flooded with light. The writing points out the eggs, the thresholds painted half white, half black, one inverted from the other, and describes what lies beyond: a bench, an almost invisible phrase, a room that, although actually in penumbra, is described as so luminous that almost nothing can be seen in it.

In that second room, a text on black paper contextualizes the work through Eugene Thacker’s essay (Black on Black, 2015), where I found Fludd’s image; on the wall, the phrase “All that exists” is printed in white vinyl, the same tone as the wall, barely legible due to its relief and subtle sheen. It may appear when the gaze lingers or remain unnoticed.

Look, approach, read, linger. The question returns: Is this the same encounter? Is one encounter all encounters? Image and disappearance, side by side.