Rosa García & Adrián Porcel
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Factory of Light
Rosa García and Adrián Porcel, 2026.
Video, 12 min, 30 sec.
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I may die; but first you, my tyrant and tormentor, shall curse the sun that gazes on your misery. Beware, for I am fearless, and therefore powerful. I will watch with the wiliness of a snake, that I may sting with its venom. Man, you shall repent of the injuries you inflict.
Mary Shelley, 1818 [1]
Factory of Light is a video creation that explores the complex bonds between human beings and their environment through speculative fiction. The work puts pressure on the dynamics of power exerted over the landscape and reveals how, within a capitalocentric framework, hierarchies arise that assign position and value to each agent involved. The piece is structured around a text that grants voice to the territory itself. From this displaced enunciation, the ecosystem addresses humanity through a disquisition that intertwines imaginaries of material intelligence, reflections on the control of the horizon, and analogies with processes of spatial devastation. Nature emerges as a presence that has exceeded human dominion and that, by virtue of this escape, is perceived as monstrous.
The proposal maintains that every form of existence emerges in correspondence, and that no entity can be understood apart from the relationships that constitute it. The friction applied to the structures of power that configure the landscape enters into dialogue with Donna Haraway’s critique, particularly in relation to human exceptionalism and the illusion of self-sufficiency [2]. In the context examined by the work, hierarchies not only distribute resources, but also organize perceptions and determine which entities are recognized as agents, while others are relegated to the condition of an exploitable background.
Granting voice to the ground we inhabit entails dismantling the economy of visibility and recognizing the dense web of interdependencies that binds the human to the non-human. The notion of “compost” that Haraway examines makes it possible to think of these interactions as a continuous flow of transformations among bodies, times, and diverse factors, in which each existence depends on others. Anna Tsing’s perspective expands this reading by situating devastation as a historical condition from which precarious forms of coexistence emerge [3]. The landscape evoked by Factory of Light is not presented as a closed scenario; rather, it is configured as a field traversed by unexpected continuities, where life persists at the margins of exploitation and ruin.
The notion of material intelligence that resonates within the disquisition approaches the discourse developed by Laura Tripaldi, in which matter is conceived as a dynamic system [4]. It does not remain immobile or passive; it records, responds to, and reorganizes the forces that affect it. Recordings of oil platforms and coal mines, processed until they acquire expressive qualities, show that devastation leaves audible traces, as if these substances had developed a forced physiology under extractive pressure. Complementarily, the use of modular synthesizers as an extension of the sonic body reflects this relational ontology, in which each variation alters and depends on the whole, demonstrating the impossibility of isolated action.
Within this conceptual framework is inscribed Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley. The creature assembled from remnants allows us to think of technical production as an act that generates forms of life perforated by unchosen structural violence. The monstrous ceases to name the strange and becomes a conceptual core that returns the gaze and reveals the responsibility contained in every creative and reformative gesture. The work thus shifts attention away from the obsession with learning how to live toward the urgency of learning how to die as a practice of transmission and care. Death is conceived as an elemental redistribution within a shared world and as a recognition of the vulnerability that links infrastructures, organisms, and territories within the same network of codependence.
[1] Own translation. Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein o el Moderno Prometeo. Translated by Francisco Torres Oliver. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2011, p. 206. Original edition: 1818.
[2] Haraway, Donna: Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
[3] Tsing, Anna: The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.
[4] Tripaldi, Laura: Parallel Minds: Discovering the Intelligence of Materials. London: Urbanomic, 2022.
Video script:
I wouldn’t know how to say it with certainty. There was an instant when I felt like demolishing the entire house, with its lives stuck to the walls, and letting their screams soothe me. The confession remained suspended in an icy breath and, with Arctic warmth, a caress of dust drew the eyelids back toward the mountains. I lower my head and take in gray oxygen—that dirty breath which is now our favorite creation—and I think of the form of tenderness as an animal trembling on its feet. Ah, sweet beast, listen to me.
It was a gentle punishment, the green fire. Similar to a wound that burns and is the maker of half-lives. If skin covered in death could be contained by some amount of love, it would be a mountain or a cloud, vents of moisture through which pain might sink. And I would step on that sponge of opportunities, I would drink its immensity to rinse the throat of pain and of betrayed ash. And now—now—I would hurl myself inward into the toxin that smokes inside me. An essence emanates that colors my flesh a green that does not match the others. My greenness separates us, you always control it. I saw it, a prison that is at once a diagram of the world, reduced by mechanical wasps. The sound of danger, a presage. What creature wounds while it sleeps, speaking in dreams. I, gone feral, cause ravages, whispers. They say—the diagnoses—that my language induces insomnia. I don’t know. Perhaps it is the price of waking from a devoured night.
You control with caresses and assure everyone that you are coming from taking care of me. They restrain their horror at standing on top of the monster and not at the level of its calamities. I think coldly. The symbiotic creature grips its host with fear in its nails, a dislocation in order finally to inhabit firmly what is its own, leaving me defeated. We both feel guilt. That is the landscape, and so is the line that sentences the property of each one, their kind of intelligence, their strength. You build your systems from on high, precipitating an avalanche of contingency onto each of the parts, but the most complex structures are unstable agents, organs of chance, matter by surprise, mirrors of order that concentrate the dreadful light of day. The siege of the ruins begins until, in their new fury, they live.
The obsolete giants, now that they are golems, awaken from among the rust of their installations, unearth their old inertia, of mud and bone. And I think, as one thinks in a low voice, that contact is nothing but an exchange of experiences or, at the very least, of consequences. But what happens if there is nothing to exchange? If an elephant is not a gigantic bacterium, an ocean cannot simply be a scattered brain. The virus, a drive that forgets life and possesses an automaton voracity. It feasts parasitically on the organism it infects, continues non-living until it suits it, then it dies. Your mode of contact is the same, yet the insistence on domesticating the nature of things is the deep shadow of mankind. You hold a simplistic position that gives meaning to your species above all else. Knowing how to die would complicate your body and would turn into a viral process, you would cease to be intelligent, you would fall apart. But you are simple and you do not serve as compost for wounded flourishing. Your knowledge is praxis of slaughter.
The dead you leave in your wake wander disobedient thanks to their acidic lucidity, they are remains in their zombie nature, governable only by sorcery. That rot corrodes the heart of green capitalism. Humusities arise from this island of decomposition, a soil enriched by all your falls, by the phosphates of collapse that taste of burned trunk, potassic declines with the smell of the Great Birnam wood. You fear me because you leave a useful trail. No rocket that belongs to you will reach the many nerve endings of a galaxy. There is no fuel to extend life any further, nor to pulverize the tender tissue I shelter among my basal strata. Your destruction will be revelatory, and you will arrive, yes, at another mouth of the world—very mistaken if you think you will be immune—and there too you will have to learn how to die.
This work was developed within the framework of a research stay at the Department of Fine Arts of Iceland University of the Arts, Reykjavík, coordinated by Bjarki Bragason.