Genealogy of Fire

Intervention in an archaeological site: Old Monastery of San Juan de la Peña / Aragonese Pyrenees. Created within the framework of the Nomadic Borders project. Curated by Blanca Pérez Ferrer and Jean Jacques Gay.

Dimensions: 290 x 440 cm.

Technique: Electronics, programming, sound.

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2021

Interventions

The project involved interventions at three archaeological sites through a luminous installation—an electronic artwork of large scale, capable of engaging with its surroundings and breathing new life into spaces steeped in history, symbolically reactivating these spiritual architectures. The use of technology, understood as “contemporary fire,” allows bridges to be built through time in search of the latent consciousness within these spaces that once held other sacred fires. Technology, nature, and spirituality converge in this experience, which proposes artistic practice as a source of knowledge—offering a new perspective from which to approach these memory-laden places.

Contemporary Fire

The mastery of fire is regarded as the first technological milestone in the history of human civilization. In Greek mythology, Prometheus steals fire from the gods and gives it to humanity, initiating a process that ultimately leads to the mastery of technique and scientific knowledge. Fire is the mythological origin of technology, and in our present era, this fire is electricity—ridden by electronics and computation.

Poetics of the media

Just as fire plays with wood in a bonfire, computer code dances within silicon cells, creating unpredictable patterns. Deserts of transistors are flooded by oceans of electrons in quantum universes. Information, carried by the electric serpent, interweaves and bursts into unpredictable flashes of light. Zeroes and ones drive motion in the computational cabala. Processes cascade into one another in search of a balance in constant flux. Order and chaos wrestle in an unresolved process that pushes forward through thousands of luminescent diodes.

Real Monasterio de Rueda. España

Abadía de Saint-Vincent de Lucq. Bearn. Francia

Locations

Around the year 1000, the foundations of a political and religious European community began to take shape, modeled on the Sacrum Romanum Imperium, originally inspired by Charlemagne’s constructive faith and his close collaboration with Rome. Capitalizing on the prestige of men and women who had chosen the path of spiritual retreat in pursuit of illumination—apatheia—and who were venerated as saints and sages, a top-down unification project was launched by kings, counts, and bishops, integrating popular religiosity into Roman rites and tradition.

By the end of the 10th century, monastic foundations proliferated in the County of Gascony, spurred by the rise of Cluny and the spread of the Rule of Saint Benedict, as seen in the Abbey of Saint-Vincent de Lucq, in Béarn. According to tradition, when Childebert I returned from the siege of Zaragoza in 542, one of his lieutenants founded an oratory in Lucq dedicated to Saint Vincent. Thus, the monastery would bear his name.

The Benedictine reform was introduced by Sancho the Great in the 1030s at San Juan de la Peña, which was already a major monastic center thanks to donations from Aragonese counts and Navarrese kings, and the establishment of an almonry. Further south, the Royal Monastery of Rueda is located on the banks of the Ebro River in Zaragoza province. A Cistercian architectural gem, it was founded in the 12th century under the reign of Alfonso II of Aragon. This order, a branch of the Benedictines, was known for its austerity and rigor, seeking a return to primitive monastic life and strict observance of the Rule of Saint Benedict. The monastery stands out for its impressive waterwheel, which supplied the complex and its lands with water—symbolizing both engineering prowess and the Cistercian community’s self-sufficiency.