In this conversation, we will explore the aesthetic, ethical, and political dimensions of the video series El cielo cayendo (Under the Falling Sky), focusing on how art can confront—and reframe—systemic crises without surrendering to apocalyptic despair.
Ernst van Alphen’s pioneering work on visuality, trauma, and historical memory offers a critical framework to discuss the series’ central questions: Can art represent collapse without becoming its spectacle? How do glitches, repetitions, and deliberate “failures” in the works serve as forms of resistance to smooth, consumable narratives of disaster?
We will examine how the camera functions not as a passive recorder but as an active agent—a diseased yet diagnostic organ—that metabolizes violence, ecological erosion, and migration crises into new visual codes. The conversation will also address the role of sound as reverse archaeology, the use of maquettes as speculative landscapes, and the ethical implications of making art in—and about—an age of perpetual crisis.
This dialogue aims to open a broader discussion on art’s capacity to disrupt conditioned ways of seeing and imagine forms of solidarity and sensing otherwise.
