Luis González Palma

An Island Made of Water

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"The photographs I present were made from hundreds of images taken with the electron microscope at the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of the National University of Córdoba in Argentina. Images captured individually and later reassembled into the original photographs from a radically different perspective.

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The prints are produced on onion paper, a material of great fragility, symbolically close to our always uncertain, unconscious memory—one that inhabits us, or that we inhabit quietly and in silence."

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The Smell of Pine Is What You Hear

I believe that in our memory every smell has a sound that accompanies it. In mine, the smell of pine that filled my aunt’s garden while I played reminds me of my maternal grandmother’s voice, whom I always visited on the rooftop: the smell of pine and her voice were the same to me—an emotion I now understand as subtle caresses during a desperate childhood.

 

This project was born from the desire to venture into the microscopic world of dedications or notes often found on the back of family photographs. Traces that live in a space that pulses—hidden and silent. By magnifying these minimal lines a hundred times through an electron microscope, we can find unexpected forms; we simply need to see them from unprecedented perspectives. We live in a world in which other worlds dwell. One only needs imagination to understand that the infinite universe has its mirror in the microscopic, something evident to privileged beings who have expressed it throughout history across different cultures.

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“The Smell of Pine Is What You Hear” is an extension of another project (“An Island Made of Water”). Both pursue the same goal: to reveal the visual aspects of a world that remains inaccessible to us without the aid of technology.

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It also speaks to something that moves me deeply: becoming aware that in my family photographs I carry the scent of my past—a scent that evokes murmurs and sounds of a distant time that continues to echo in my memory, in my body.

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Much of what moves and stirs me lies within a few grams of matter. Entire universes. In the end, it seems I carry the stars not only in my consciousness, but also in what I hold and gently touch in the palm of my hand—with the brush of my fingers and the silence of my gaze.

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A Stone Bird

The bird imagines its wings flying freely, and although its claws cling tightly to an already dry branch, its freedom has no limits. To achieve this, it knows that a certain inner calm is required, the serenity of the wind, an agreement with the clouds, and the practice of patience.

A meditative space is needed—trust that there are paradises that have not been lost, that are still there, ready to offer a fleeting moment of joy. The bird breathes and then closes its eyes.

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My search is not solely for the connection between two branches distant from each other. My true search is for the encounter between my gaze and the miracle of life; between my work and the viewer’s gaze—two natures that meet through a visual and emotional experience charged with sensitivity. Like a blind person who deciphers a text through the touch of their fingers. My desire is to establish a poetic dialogue born from the unexpected, to generate an image that stimulates our imagination.

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In the end, this project is a metaphor for the encounter with oneself and with the other; with otherness, with difference, with the foreign and the familiar.

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By the way, what does a stone bird dream of?

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A Trembling Light

The Moon—this celestial body—has not only illuminated the minds of scientists and astronomers throughout history; it has also been the source from which much poetry has flowed, and it has been part of symbolic imagination since the beginning of humanity.

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But the Moon is not only our celestial companion; it is, one could say, a living body in constant change, interacting reciprocally with the Earth.

One example of this is its seismic activity. Since the U.S. space program made contact with the lunar surface, several seismographs were installed that have recorded lunar seismic activity known as “moonquakes.” These movements can be shallow, of medium depth, or deep. This means that our 4.51-billion-year-old satellite continues to transform.

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It is geologically active—meaning a celestial body in constant evolution and change.

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The idea behind this project is to replace the locations of the recorded moonquake epicenters with a hidden sonority; transforming an act of energy release into one of symbolic and poetic nature. To achieve this, the geographic references of the epicenters were transferred to a card which, when perforated, activates the mechanism of a music box.

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Luis González Palma