Sixteen seconds of happiness are enough to know a whole life, but not to forget it. We can think about the fleeting nature of beauty and desire, and we can be affected by this. There is infinite power in creating together and of joining hands, intentions, and paths. Arriving, accompanied, to a place you never imagined could be so kind and generous. Sharing your gesture until you no longer recognize it or, even more beautifully, you recognize it in another person. When does the most minimal gesture expire? Certainly not while it reverberates in your nervous system and grips the pit of your stomach, while it causes a tingle in the back of your neck or a pinch in your soul.

Darkness envelops light and gives it meaning. Without blinking, without night, there would be nothing to see, everything would be pure white. Brightness escapes from the small eclipses of darkened eucalyptus, an entropy of happiness. Without entropy, there would be no movement, no affectation, no commotion, no life to be disturbed. Like a diamond set in a tooth you can’t stop looking at, wanting your eyes to collect every diffracted flash of light and keep them all inside. If light contains all colors, then we are continually storing rainbows in our eye sockets. Fireworks, nothing more fleeting than a light burning in the sky. Each spark a world, a universe. A tungsten bulb is a red-hot wire, burning metal lit with desire potentially indefinitely. Like the sun, everything it illuminates burns out bit by bit. Glimpses of an origin, an end, and a whole in everything, in the polished ash tree that surrenders to its surroundings, reflecting, giving its surface to other lights, not only its own. A swarm of circles in which to gaze, spinning and causing a small displacement of yourself relative to the context, like walking backward or doing a handstand. So much can be changed without going anywhere.

If you scratch a wall, at least three layers appear. If you scratch human skin hard enough there are at least five layers. It’s not that what’s underneath doesn’t exist, it’s there underneath, seen by inner eyes that understand textures, pulses, and pressures. That which you know is there but, since you don’t see it, you can’t quite make it out. Structural change can also, obviously, affect external appearance. Oxygenating, in the sense of “airing out, breathing fresh air,” and also in the sense of oxidizing, of discoloring. Wearing color to contrast with previous color, which now seems to have more tone by comparison. Getting tangled up in something is sacrificing a part of yourself for the sum of another part, composing shadows of braided images. The grid of moments is impossible to decipher due to the intricacy of the pattern. What remains of the image when everything is form? The social condition of an involuntary preselection, having things done for you, means they do things for you. Standardized formats of pre-established modular panels. The question is how to arrange the puzzle with the pieces I am given, right? Of course, a circle turned on itself, protruding from a wall by 4 inches, can shake an entire room, and a plank, no matter how tightly it is glued to the wall, can fall on us and fill the entire center, which we previously occupied in anticipation.

A kick first hits the air, it moves through a mass of dissolved gases, its direction determined by the effort expended, the flexibility of the ligaments and the mobility of the joints. The air reacts, of course, it makes way for the leg, for what else can it do, and then disperses in waves until it becomes one with the environment again. The force of a butterfly’s wing, between 10 and 100 µm thick. “To give you an idea, 10 µm is about 10 times thinner than a human hair.” In this dispersion there are faint black flashes, reminiscent of eclipses. Solemn, elegant, distinguished confetti. Handfuls of solemnity, elegance, and distinction. Limp flowers covering the ground, falling on your shoulders and hair. To find one another under the shower of flowers and share desires and disappointments for life. To begin the struggle for that place between where I want to be, how I want to do things, and how I end up doing them or where I end up being. To seek the narrow margin between poetry and frivolity, beauty and speculation, politicization and extractivism. To wage battles and to end them, letting them fade away, not letting them go somewhere else where we can’t see them because then they’re too far away, letting them dissipate and, thus, leave the room for life. Make 10 µm equal 350 km, stretch out the 16 seconds, in order to at least get used to it.

(All images: Exhibition view Sixteen Seconds Happy. Julia Rodríguez, Igna Buneri. Curated by Íñigo Villafranca Apesteguia. Room 504, Barcelona. April 5-6, 2025. Courtesy © Igna Buneri)