What is there beyond the clouds, before the sun

Abstract

This visual essay stems from a series of works that pictorially interpret the sky, accompanied by poems, which emerged from observations and meditative reflections on the human-environment relationship. In this proposal, the act of “looking up” evolves from a casual gesture to an opportunity to question existence, time, and mortality. The sky presents a constantly changing natural scene of colors, shapes, and lights; a rich yet silent visual space, often taken for granted. This intangible realm allows for expanding the imagination regarding ways to understand the world and how we appropriate a territory framed by cultural and symbolic notions (Covarrubias et al., 2018). Based on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ontological concept of the flesh, we assume that our body acts as a mediator, both as an object and an interlocutor of our existence. Thus, intuition becomes a key artistic tool to experience the invisible aspects of the body and explore our smallness through sensitive ethnography (Moscoso, 2021). Free from references to traditional scales — sun, earth, horizon, figures — the landscape reveals its own dimension through nuances, textures, layers, and transparencies. This results in an artistic medium and creative methodology for sensorially understanding this landscape, the world, and the aesthetic experience: an act of imagination.