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 work that explores the complex relationships between human beings and their surroundings through speculative fiction. The work tensions the dynamics of power exerted over the landscape and exposes how, within a capitalocentric framework, hierarchies are erected that determine the position and value of each involved agent. The piece is structured around a text that gives voice to the territory itself. From there, the landscape addresses humanity through a discourse that intertwines imaginaries of material intelligence, reflections on the control of the horizon, and a direct analogy with processes of spatial devastation. Nature emerges as an entity that has escaped human dominion and is therefore perceived as monstrous. Within this dissonance appears the figure conceived by Mary Shelley, understood not as an anomaly but as fabricated life, assembled from remnants and compelled to exist within a violence it did not choose. As in Frankenstein (1818), the monstrous ceases to designate the strange and becomes that which holds the gaze and returns it, revealing the responsibility embedded in every act of production. The soundscape is constructed from modular synthesizers, whose operation depends on the constant interrelation of their components. To this framework are added recordings of oil platforms and coal mines, distorted until they acquire expressive qualities, as if the territory had been compelled to develop an audible and unnatural physiology. These procedures allow for questioning the impact of human interventions and activate reflections associated with the concept of compost, understood as a network of transformations and continuities between bodies. From this perspective, the work shifts attention from the obsession with learning to live toward the urgency of learning to die, conceiving death as an act of generational transmission and care for the world.
[1] Own translation. Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein o el Moderno Prometeo. Translated by Francisco Torres Oliver. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2011, p. 206. Original edition: 1818.
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.