"The Love of a Shade and the Jealousy of an Aura" (2020)

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This work was created during lockdown, when most human contact shifted to screens. Social life became a series of curated frames—backdrops, filters, lighting, and digital masks. We appeared as versions of ourselves, luminous but distant, rehearsing presence without touch. Conversation thinned into fragments, short messages and quick reactions that rarely added up to connection. The body’s language—its pauses, gestures, and silences—was left out. Communication became efficient but hollow, intimacy reduced to the feeling of something almost there but never whole.

The piece takes shape as a shallow steel basin filled with water and salt. It offers a mirror, but not a stable one. The same saltwater that creates reflection also corrodes the vessel holding it. The image exists only because the container is slowly destroyed. What is seen is inseparable from what disappears. The mirror does not preserve; it erodes. To look into it is to watch matter change, to see endurance and fragility joined together.

The title comes from the first operatic version of Echo and Narcissus - Amor d'Un'Ombra e Gealosia d'Un'Aura. Like Narcissus, who fell in love with his reflection, we are drawn to images that cannot give anything back—whether in water, steel, or digital screens. And still, nothing truly vanishes. Lavoisier’s law tells us that matter only changes form: flesh becomes pixel, steel becomes rust, voice becomes echo. Presence shifts, but it remains. This piece is both mirror and ruin, both reflection and disappearance—a reminder that what connects us also consumes us.