Almost every centimetre of the planet has been measured and handed over to the metaphors of possession built by the human species, but the sky represents something more: the intangible, the unbounded, the wind, the air, the oxygen, but also hope, the mystical, faith and the beyond.
What lies above our heads is one of the last surfaces no fence has ever reached, and in CELESTE it becomes a field of data, digital poetics and visual metaphor.
The work reads the colour of the sky as a form of shared property. A commons where humanity meets without conflict, without the troubled pasts or the inequalities that divide the ground below. A beacon photographs the sky over a city. In that same instant, the system fuses that image with the sky thousands of kilometres away, and the blues of the world's skies — as has already happened with Bogotá, Lisbon, London, Paris, Medellín, Alicante, Cali or Valencia (in previous editions) — dissolve into a single reading that belongs to no place at all. What appears is a map and a moment at once, a portrait of the present sky of a common, shared celestial vault above our heads and longing.
CELESTE is also a database — of tones, of photons that become RGB data and are made available to a time and a space that do not exist. A technological transformation of reality as understood before what we see, translated by the language of technology. A new geopolitical space, virgin and ours, with its own real atmosphere of its hour, time, latitude and longitude, and a signature of the social climate that accompanies it.
CELESTE becomes an archive we will be able to open later, as a way back to the one part of the world that never belonged to us nor fell under any external control — a fragment of nature that remained beyond the reach of ownership.
When night drains the colour from the sky, the system dreams. In place of the readings it can no longer take, it returns invented skies, idealised and recoloured — a reminder that the firmament has always been a place of desire as much as of observation, a place we look up to in order to imagine precisely the skies that do not exist.
The installation has been growing since 2017, when it was first unveiled in Valencia. With more than a million shots of the sky and, at the time, the proposal of creating unique sky archives — or what we might call "proto-NFTs" — the work keeps connecting different places around the world under a single logic. That of the space of the non-frontier.