The three vigils

Emblazoned on my memory is an image of a set of dining room chairs carefully arranged in the middle of the road that connected the town to the creek, though I’m uncertain that I ever actually saw this. We were living in Cumbitara at the time, in a house located next to a path and across the way from a hill. Amid that landscape, the furniture was placed in the road in the most profound silence. And thus that image became a part of me, though I hardly knew what it might mean. In my artistic practice, the idea of a hybrid landscape became recurrent, reconstructed and resignified by elements that were at once alien to it and then welcomed so naturally, it was as if they had always been meant to appear there. 

The name of the work comes from the idea of vigilia, or vigil, a word with multiple connotations in Spanish that can be religious or military in nature, or indicative of the sleep disorder insomnia. This last condition can play with perception and bring on altered and delirious states that are typical of exhaustion. It was thus, during a bout of untreated insomnia, that the strongest symptoms of my mother’s psychiatric illness began. Likely more than 40 years ago, these symptoms would go on to modify the emotional and logical dynamics of our relationship.