The reflection of your face in a black puddle, as if it were a photograph on the screen of an iPhone. A line of lights bounces across the liquid. Your footsteps, circling the small pool of water, create ripples that distort your face in the mirror on the floor, making the lights vibrate, generating tiny waves that remind you of that night on that beach, of flickering stars, of when you were a child and played by gliding your hands across the surface of the sea, listening to the drops falling and splashing. You remember that nighttime walk through the city, just after the rain, illuminated by streetlights, immersed in your thoughts. What is remembering, imagining, projecting, daydreaming, if not a private intervention?

There is a highly graphic Chilean expression: quedé pa’dentro. It means to be left stunned, absorbed, overwhelmed. When you receive bad news, or something saddens you, you quedas pa’dentro — you retreat inward. A kind of meditative state in which external stimuli — the outside world — bounce off and fail to penetrate the body. Art, undoubtedly, can also provoke this condition, through connections both external and internal, compelling us to look inward. Let us read the work of David Scognamiglio from this perspective: let us consider the word intervention as polysemic.

A public intervention, such as the one he carried out in the housing development Ciudad de los Valles.

The best neighborhoods await you.

Ciudad de los Valles is a kind of urban microsystem situated on the outskirts of Santiago, complete with its church, gymnasium, and supermarket, inhabited by 2,000 families. Scognamiglio entered this city within the city in order to carry out a public intervention — which was filmed, and whose recording is included in the exhibition at the Galería Gabriela Mistral, a space dependent on a public institution. The action — placing a prism of light in the street — lacked authorization, and there was no way of predicting how the residents would react. Nothing happened. The interest of passersby encountering those strange lines of light in their streets was nonexistent.

This small private city, advertised by the sign “The best neighborhoods await you” — a somewhat macabre slogan — is a product of real estate speculation. A village surrounded by fences and disproportionate security measures, designed to protect inhabitants who share a defining trait with the rest of the advanced societies of the twenty-first century: an increasing amount of life spent inside the home. We live increasingly indoors, within private space, and less in plazas, streets, and parks. The internet bears major responsibility for this condition. If we add to this the privatization of public space — another characteristic of contemporary times — the result is the privatization of the public sphere in every sense, carried out voluntarily, forcibly, and clandestinely by both private and public powers.

So much so that if, by chance, during one of our escapes into the outside world, we encounter a disturbing element — a structure of light — either we fail to notice it, or it fails to interest us. The other explanation, perhaps even more troubling, is that we have been deprived — or have deprived ourselves — of opinion. Free public judgment has been hijacked: by false democracies, by the overload of advertising, by the stupefaction produced by the avalanche of links within the Global Network.

Links and connections can affect us positively — when what they lead us toward provides meaningful stimulation — or negatively, when the opposite occurs. The map previously described, of societies enclosed within their homes and governed by private interests, does not favor interpersonal connection. Still less does it encourage a more intimate connection with the Self and with the Other. Neural connections ossify: synapses, emotional bonds, internal links.

In previous works by David Scognamiglio, such as Constellations / L’Origine (2014, Nuit Blanche, Paris, France), a luminous intervention in public space, we see light reflecting off puddles in the street and crossing over the bodies of passersby. The lines of light fracture, connect with one another, and connect with both the space and its visitors. Composed of small radiant pearls, they form geometric constellations. (The role of light in relation to astronomy and architecture reaches one of its highest expressions in Islamic Art — another connection that may be drawn with Scognamiglio’s work.) These volumes, like those exhibited at Gabriela Mistral, possess an architectural conception. Diagonals that appear digitally painted, like graffiti made of light. Characteristics that remind us that the artist, in addition to having been a teenage graffiti writer, trained as an architect at the Università degli Studi di Firenze.

The exhibition — the lighting design together with the atlas of black water stains and the sound of falling drops, the video documentation of the intervention in Ciudad de los Valles, and the unframed photographs of luminous lines reflected in puddles — contains a psychological possibility, another of Scognamiglio’s concerns. There is a connection with space, a connection between the liquid and the luminous, and a connection with the exterior world (a vertical opening has been left in the gallery window facing the street so that the citizens of Santiago may observe, from outside, what lies within). Yet the exhibition also proposes a connection with our inner selves.

The concept developed through Family Constellations becomes unavoidable here: the metaphor of groups of stars appearing clustered in the sky functions as a psychotherapeutic method aimed at externalizing — making public — conflicts or traumas within a family. These sessions, notably, are also called interventions.

To see puddles beneath a roof, on the floor of an enclosed space, is a striking image. It evokes flooding, leaks, or a washing machine overflow — in other words, even at a domestic scale, a form of tragedy. The appearance of a prismatic body of light within such a setting intensifies the estrangement, though in an opposite direction: it appears almost as a divine intervention.

Light clarifies; it is the illuminating element confronting the black water, which represents the unknown, the obscure, the profound. One leans over one of these dark stains believing they are about to confront the abyss. Yet once outside the gallery, no matter how many holes one finds in the ground — wells, volcanoes, cenotes — one comes to understand that the abyss is not below, but above.

The abyss is above. It is merely a reflection, or a phrase like any other. For example: that the universe is within.