L’Altra (The Other), 2022

L’Altra (The Other) is a self-portrait. The artist’s face is impressed on the bottom of a mass of dark glass, which distorts it and makes it perceivable only from certain angles. Through a massive glass mirror, the Galileo National Telescope – that the artist visited when she was commissioned for this project – is used to observe extra-solar planets in search of a planet that behaves with its star as the Earth behaves with the Sun. The hope is to find another world like ours one day – a place where life is possible. The telescope looks for another Earth as if the gaze, overcoming the lights and atmospheric noises, was turned towards ourselves. As it happens with observations by astronomers in the absence of images, L’Altra (The Other) is the trace that manifests itself as a potential, a possible otherness, unpredictable and fluid like glass.