LUMEN SPIRALIS © 2025
Lumen Spiralis, 2025
Iron, acrylic, RGB LEDs, DMX controller, computer
400 × 325 × 400 (h) cm
Ieronimus Medieval Towers, Salamanca
Lumen Spiralis is an immersive artistic installation that proposes a sensory and symbolic experience centered on knowledge understood as a vital energy in constant transformation. Inspired by the logarithmic spiral—a form present in nature, mathematics, art, and spirituality—the work articulates a poetics of knowledge in motion through a constellation of symbolic elements: the book, light, the archive, and the city.
The central piece consists of a large spiral constructed from books arranged as structural modules. Their spines have been cut with letters from different alphabets, both Greek and Latin, forming a lattice-like structure that allows light to pass through. From the heart of the spiral emanates a pulsating, dynamic light source—a metaphor for the pulse of thought, consciousness, and shared memory. This light passes through the cut-out texts and projects letters in flight onto walls, floors, and bodies, overflowing the physical boundaries of the book to become visual experience, resonance, and movement.
These projections transform the space into a living, mutable archive. The word is no longer contained: it circulates, multiplies, and becomes atmosphere. Constantly shifting according to the viewer’s position and the movement of light, the projections generate an enveloping environment in which knowledge is no longer linear or accumulative, but sensory, ephemeral, and fluid. The relationship between light, shadow, and language constructs an intermediate space between the legible and the perceptible, the material and the intangible. Knowledge thus reveals itself not as a closed structure, but as a process in continuous opening.
Here, the archive is presented not as a static repository, but as a porous organism that breathes through light and time. The work questions traditional modes of preserving knowledge, proposing instead an active, plural, and sensitive memory, interwoven with voices, silences, and fissures.
The silhouette of the city of Salamanca folds in upon itself, tracing the logarithmic spiral that the viewer is invited to traverse physically by entering its interior. The city—with its university history, symbolic architecture, and ecclesiastical heritage—becomes an integral visual and conceptual backdrop. Salamanca, a city of letters and thought, appears as a symbolic horizon: a matrix of knowledge that dialogues with the present and projects itself toward the future.
In contrast to the myth of the Tower of Babel—symbol of linguistic fragmentation and the impossibility of shared understanding—Lumen Spiralis is conceived as a form of Anti-Babel: a spiral that does not collapse, but instead embraces the diversity of languages as richness rather than punishment. The work does not impose a hegemonic center, but proposes a shared core from which knowledge radiates outward.
Ultimately, Lumen Spiralis is an invitation to transit: to walk the spiral, to journey through knowledge, to be touched by light, to read in shadow, and to become part of a choreography of expanding thought. An archive of light in which knowledge does not reside in a fixed point, but in the constant movement toward the other and the multiple.
CREDITS ::
Conceptualisation: Esther Pizarro
Technology and sound: Markus Schroll
Production: Esther Pizarro Studio / Transformación de Productos Metálicos TPM
Commissioned by: Cabildo Cathedral of Salamanca
Photography: Markus Schroll
EXHIBITED IN::
Ieronimus Medieval Towers, Salamanca (Permanent installation)
