Líneas de Fuga

Lines of Flight explores the image as a process of research and the horizon as a discontinuous, ever-shifting construction. The artwork unfolds around the island of Pantelleria, strategically positioned between Europe and Africa in the central Mediterranean. Conceived as an installation, it brings together a sequence of analog photographs taken along the perimeter road that encircles the island, a road originally built for military surveillance. Framed by this concrete path, the visual journey becomes a continuous encounter with the horizon—fragmented, disrupted, and reimagined.

What began as a mechanism of control turns into a perceptual drift, where the boundary between observation and experience, between cartography and wandering, gradually dissolves. The photographs resist the idea of a stable landscape, layering interruptions that unsettle the expected continuity of the open sea. Beneath apparent uniformity, discontinuities pulse; each image returns to the horizon differently, while traces of light reveal overlapping times that never recur. Linearity bends into circularity, and continuity into fleeting fragments.

The piece draws on the notion introduced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: a process of creative deterritorialization that refuses pre-established order and instead generates fractures opening the possibility of becoming otherwise. Here, the horizon—usually conceived as a promise of openness—appears bound to a closed circuit. Through repetition and overlapping exposures, the authoritarian gaze inscribed in the circular infrastructure is overturned.

The assembled photographs are presented as a single continuous fragment. The installation extends 13.40 meters in length and 24 centimeters in height, mounted in a linear sequence on nine pillars that evoke the island’s perimeter within the exhibition space. Visitors are invited to walk its interior, following a suspended line 155 centimeters above the ground—drawn between sea and concrete, between inside and outside. Each pillar becomes a threshold: a material interruption that fractures the image’s continuity while at the same time keeping it alive in tension.

Accompanying the installation are the ceramics titled Contact Sheet, a reference to the photographic proof sheet, here transposed into clay as a medium of inscription. Each piece carries tactile imprints of lived experience, overlapping with what memory brings to the surface. The ceramic fragments, placed behind the photographic assemblage, were conceived through both tactile and visual memory, evoking the body’s encounter with the landscape. In this way, the work is not bound to sight alone, but extends into the body and material memory.

Curatorial text by Adriana Monroy Galindo

The work is part of the project Landscapes of Control, an investigation into infrastructures in the Mediterranean as material expressions of power, domestication, and permanence.
Produced thanks to the Research Grant from La Escocesa, Fàbrica de Creació, Barcelona.
Amb el suport de l’Institut de Cultura de Barcelona (ICUB).