ESPEJISMOSS (MIRAGESS)

They say the mountains of Peru are deeply slumbering dinosaurs...
... cities grow in their dreams and tremble at their slightest movements. Home is a giant animal that sometimes feels alien to us. While the center of the earth shifts, changes its location, its purpose, we continue to seek it in the constellation of our collection of mysteries. Those that tell of times so distant they end up near, where we learned from other species, terrestrial inhabitants taught us to forge iron and cut stones, we conversed with the stars, our minds synchronized in a stealthy school to install possibilities on every shore, at every door. The future was a mirror where we reflected together, between your reflection and you there was a door, an entrance for dolphins, mirages that expand through time.

When one thinks of lost civilizations, it's hard not to find fragments of a loving object within us, memories of a journey we did not make. If we become extinct, the desert will continue to expand, and it's part of its charismatic allure: the plates of the stegosaurus, the grand sail of the spinosaurus, the crest and horns of the triceratops, the great crest of the hadrosaurus, bizarre structures of a mountainous system. Until the present, we are pyramidal temples of desire, ruins of eternal loves; we are not alone in the universe, but loneliness connects us with those species so distant, from memory it calls them, names them an ecosystem. Aileen senses that continuing to create with sand and clay, inhabiting the microcosm that the sea brings us, is a good way to survive the next great extinction. Tilsa Otta

This series was exhibited at ARCO Madrid in 2023.