CARLOS IRIJALBA
Pamplona, Spain, 1979
Received the Fundación Botín Art Grant in 2007

Twilight 9. 2008
Photographic mixed media
100 x 300 cm
Gift of the artist, 2007

TWILIGHT
Lat: 43° 28’ 33.1026” Long: 3° 47’ 32.2044”
Lat: 43° 5’ 57.2202” Long: 1° 31’ 12.8382”

Twilight consists of the relocation of a lighting tower from a sports field—a space hyper-defined by and for spectacle, whose descriptive lighting presents its subject as the only existing one. This tower has been moved to one of the last forests in Europe, the Irati forest in northern Navarra, creating as a replica a redefinition of the real as visible, using the very language of spectacle.

The project addresses the way in which the West constructs a circuit of the real through light. Natural lighting provides a consequential dimension of space-time; however, the Western approach to lighting, beyond producing an eternal day, entails a disruption of structures and cycles toward the construction of an abstract environment that loses all relation except with itself. Fire, as the first artificium, and later artificial light, have symbolized the place of transformation. Spectacle has inherited this place and its connotations, delimiting the plane of the visible for its consumption, directing attention toward a series of pseudo-events.