What does it make it? Mesmerizing, as soon as there is some light integrating the realm of fantasy, imagination, even of god, with the realm of touching, grounding, earthing, the material that leads us to take action to decide. At times, the decisions can be very blurry, or they cannot be absolutely defined. Since I was little, I was always wanting to stay in this liminal place where I could still be dreaming awake. I would see colors, listen to sounds, and be mesmerized by the stimuli that my senses were perceiving, but was that real, or was that something I was making up? Fast forward many, many years, now I feel that this is how inspiration lands: it lands because I hear something, I see something, I am stimulated by my senses, or even better, by my emotional body. The senses are trying to translate into a form, to a shape, to a sentence, to an idea, into something that must make sense. I like this liminal space that we are in right now in the collective, where most of the things that are revealed are possibly waking more people up. The conspiracy theorist already knew this because we were able to sense these anomalies. We were able to trust our bodies with the knowledge of what really was going to hurt us or not. As an artist, I work not with less is more, but I start with more is more. The more, the merrier. I get stimulated by music or landscape or even just words and ideas, and then I go through a whole journey of accumulation of these, gathering them either printed on the wall or in places that I can have a distance and observe them. This practice is super important, not only in art but in life. The accumulation of stimuli can sometimes distort what we see, our perception. If our perception is distorted, then the narratives we create can have severe consequences. What happens when I can no longer create that distance? “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” — William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell These times and in the next 18 months, we have the possibility to really grasp beyond this timeline that you perceive as reality. Like Ulysses in The Odyssey, who gets lured by the sirens, it is not his sexual appetite that moves him, but the appetite for knowledge, for knowing what is real in that moment. We all get lured by fantastic shapes, by possibilities of self-glory, by being loved by someone or a whole group of people. In reality, can we really see ourselves? How is our reality mesmerized or not? Odysseus gives me another question: can I listen to the song without surrendering the direction of the vessel? was the danger the song itself? if not, the danger appears when the lure smashes the direction with a false sense of authority. Let us explore the word “mesmerizing.” Etymologically, mesmerism takes its name from Franz Anton Mesmer. He believed that an invisible, universal force could operate through and between bodies, something he called animal magnetism. What passes between a body and an image, between one person and another, between memory and perception, that gives something enough force to enthrall us? I love this word because, throughout my artwork, I have been told many times by my commissioners, clients, and the public that my work has this capacity to mesmerize, to hypnotize, leading directly to Hypnos, sleep. I keep returning to this language throughout this inquiry: dreaming awake, waking up, illusion, delusion, awakening from a dream. Perhaps mesmerization exists somewhere along that threshold, where I am awake enough to perceive and still capable of dreaming what I perceive into another form. In a way, I see myself as mysterious at times because I do not even understand the definition of how I am seen or how I see myself. Depending on the perspective, I could see myself more as a logical intellectual wanting to find out the meaning of things, or sometimes as the loopy, foggy persona that wants to keep things in the mystery because it is a safe place to be. Now, it is neither one nor the other, because I have not been going back and forth. I have been integrating how these qualities served different purposes. I will zoom out a little bit so you can connect to what I am saying. If you zoom out in your life, let us say one month, one year, one decade, and possibly more, and you go back to what was motivating you in your childhood to be curious and fascinated by how reality worked, find yourself in the room when you were a child and see what you were surrounded by: -Did you have musical instruments? -Did you have posters of people that you loved, movies? -Did you have a rack of books? -Did you have a space in the garage that had many tools or vehicles? -Were you always out in the field running around behind a ball, a football, or bouncing one on the court? What kind of motivation was luring you to pay attention to something or someone where you could feel included and feel taken? In my case, it was always between two things: being with a large group of people, laughing, dancing, playing tricks, being a menace for the group because I always had crazy ideas and I was not perhaps the most sane leader in the group. Giggles will lure me, stupid jokes will fascinate me, but at the same time, those are very silent, well-kept, mysterious questions that wanted to go and investigate: -Read books. -Watch movies to get lured by other people’s narratives. -Heavy journaling and always creating something (a young photographer and clothes-maker). -Ponder how reality was possible. -Were the planets real planets? -Could I reach them? -Questions like this simply became: Where did my father go once he crashed his car and perished? -Where do dead people go? -Can I communicate with them? -Can I read his underlined books to find him? -Why do I have to believe religion telling me that he actually is in heaven? -What and where is heaven anyways? The questions, little questions about how things work, became existential, and that has been my path. I got mesmerized by the bigger questions, perhaps induced by the absence of my father or the willingness to be so close to him. I created a whole new reality that mesmerized my life. Only in the last year have I been able to understand this kind of projection, because if we take how projection works, it is fascinating. In order to project something, you need a machine, or a device. You need something that emits light, and it is pointed at the surface. The distance from the lens to the surface is going to determine the size of it. This is where the word projection becomes almost literal in my life, from the Latin proicere, to throw forward. The English word first appears as an alchemical term for casting a powder onto molten metal to transmute it. Something inside throws an image forward. The image lands on a surface outside of me, and distance changes its scale. What I carry inside can suddenly appear enormous simply because of where and how it is being projected. Now, take it that you understand a little bit about lenses. You will have to have the capacity to focus. Use a lens, like the one in the eye, to focus so that what you see is clear or not. Without the focus, you just see smoke or light being projected, but you will not have any refined image. And no one else can focus that lens for me. Someone may point toward the image, question it, love me, confront me, or stand beside me while I look at it, but the adjustment of focus belongs to the person looking through the lens. Even our projections in life, sometimes coming from very strong emotions that were not resolved in childhood (AKA trauma), can create narratives, create images, create opponents, and create enemies. If we feed them and we surround ourselves with situations, people, and things that are feeding that urge, we may arrive at places or situations that are absolutely detached from what we all call reality. I know I am speaking in tongues. I am mostly trying to talk about something that I have been witnessing, but there is no need to tell the details of my life very directly. It brings, at times, pain and it brings joy, depending on what perspective I am looking at. So what feeds a projection until it becomes powerful enough to recreate reality? Repetition? Emotional charge? An unresolved need? The validation of others? The pleasure of finding confirmation for an image we have already decided is true? At what precise moment does fascination become possession? Projection becomes especially hungry when it is trying to fill something that has been missing. Then every new event can become evidence, every person a character, and every coincidence can be recruited into the narrative. All I know is that every day, every morning that I wake up, I want to confront my life with what is the dream and what is the reality that I am building. This idea of mesmerization can be very positive if I am aware that I can create beauty, but at the same time I can create awareness. We are one week away from a very powerful eclipse, and I have been studying a little bit the fixed stars, the guardians of the sky. They do not move or they don’t seem to be moving as they are so far, far away. The angle from which I measure them does. The upcoming eclipse is going to have the fixed star Fomalhaut, the mouth of the fish, the Watcher of the South, directly next to the full moon in Pisces, at 4°. Granted, my Saturn is exactly that degree, so this eclipse is going to land on my first house with the ruler of my South Node. Saturn is the structure I built without a father, from the inside, through my own experience. Fomalhaut asks that vision survive contact with the ground instead of dissolving into fantasy. The eclipse is lighting up the exact site where I already had to become my own architecture. I have Alphecca, Corona Borealis, on my Moon in Scorpio at 12° i
