Itziar Barrio

(Bilbao, 1976)

A Demon that Slips into Your Telescopes while You’re Dead Tired and Blocks the Light, 2020

Single channel 4K color video with sound, RT 54:00

A Demon that Slips into Your Telescopes while You’re Dead Tired and Blocks the Light is part of a trilogy of multi-disciplinary projects that the artist have been working on since 2016.

The first chapter of the trilogy explores how those who work in science and technology impact our way of understanding and inhabiting the world, revealing the social constructs and forces of power that shape fields of “objective” knowledge. The film comprises interviews with experts in Astrobiology (NASA), Astrophysics (American Museum of Natural History) and Sociocultural Anthropology (Yale University), alongside aerial images from NASA's archives and original scenes dramatizing a speculative fiction by Laia. In these scenes, actors perform conversations between astronomical phenomena, and between a scientist and her data. The elusive brown dwarf resurfaces throughout — these indeterminate celestial entities are not strictly stars or planets, but something in between, not visible to the human eye. We could even say that they have a flexible and constantly shifting identity. Exceeding and evading any singular classification, brown dwarfs teach us about the fissures in the construction of scientific knowledge and the importance of the indeterminate and non-visible.

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