The darkest room in the house where I
grew up — a stately, white-brick cluster of
columns and gray angles of roof, curtained
in lush Virginia trees — was the bathroom
between my bedroom and playroom. This
bathroom had two doors but, significantly,
no windows through which sunshine
could intrude. If the switches were off and
doors closed, only the slimmest fault of
light could punch in along the doorframe.
My mom taught me this fact, the room’s
potential for darkness, when I was four or
five years old. She’d bought me a pack of
the glow-in-the-dark sticker stars so many
kids used to spangle their room in the early
1990s. To see the stars’ at their brightest,
we needed the darkest space available,
in spirit of contrast. With the lights on, we
arranged a portion on the bathroom wall;
they were a dull, flat cream in the light,
nearly invisible on the white paint. My
mom flicked the switch, and a supernatural
constellation, scattered like a dalmatian
hide, popped to life, while the rest of the
room settled into blackness.
Image by author.
Thirty years later, this past winter,
Andrea from Studio davidpompa talked
me through this exhibition and the studio’s
conceptualization around the work,
and their investigation into the nature and
meaning of “archives,” and I was reminded
of this memory, how it taught me the power
of coded information. Our discussion of
the studio’s featured material, cantera,
revolved around a consideration of how
the stone is created. Specifically, we talked
about how cantera’s form is, by definition,
a snapshot of the past: As a volcanic
toba, its existence is the result of the rapid
cooling of lava discharged from a volcano,
its final color and details a combination of
the exact currents of air and impurities it
encounters in those formative moments.
Varied levels of pH encode within cantera
its color, like a block of DNA. Pink indicates
it’s rich in iron; green is evidence of
oxidation. The oblong shapes of its constitutional
sediments and dust are frozen
inside while remaining visible to the naked
eye, and the shaded craters pocking its
face are a memory of the speed and energy
behind the volcanic activity that was its
genesis, sending the cantera on its chaotic
way before it solidified mid-flight.
We spoke too about the Geological
Institute in Mexico, which Studio davidpompa
visited during their research, and
how that experience entangled the idea of
an archive with their vision for this very
exhibit. Cantera, just like any mineral, is
an elegant and inviting archive in itself,
as the stone has sealed and conserved a
record of its own private, explosive past,
if you know how to read it. Cantera’s
preservation within the Geological Institute
is a conceptual echo, a reverberation.
The Institute is a man-made archive that
safekeeps far more ancient archives, formulated
by nature.
As the memory involving the glowing stars
resurfaced for me in the days after we
spoke, I recognized that it had introduced
me to two important ideas, now central to
my understanding of Studio davidpompa’s
work. The first: The way coded information
can shift between being alternatively
hidden and then brilliantly revealed, merely
by changing one’s way of looking — in
the case of the stars, the literal provision
or deprivation of light. What is at one
moment a nearly imperceptible swirling
on the wall becomes a vivid pattern. And
second: The revelation one actually feels
when discovering that coded information.
As a child, I interpreted the knowledge
of the room’s potential for darkness as
a privileged insight, a bonafide secret.
To any adult, that concept would have
seemed obvious, not worthy of consideration
or comment, but to a four-yearold,
what is plain about the world is not
always clear. Later in life, the first receipt
of even a simple fact can linger in the
memory as the profound moment when
one’s private universe permanently shifted,
even if only by a degree.
A few years later, I had a corollary experience
in another room, across the hall,
this one with broad, generous windows,
overlooking the forest that wound downhill
to the marsh that lapped at the edge
of our yard. This one is simpler to explain:
My dad, a geneticist, brought home a microscope
and a cardboard box of sample
slides, lined up on their edges, fit perfectly
to the box’s dimensions. A shred of tissue,
a dab of water, a plucked hair, contained
without exception a cosmic, dynastic
architecture, often with its own minuscule,
autonomous moving bodies, with
life, entirely alien and yet, even to a child,
instinctually, more disturbingly real than
any invention from a movie.
Algae conjugate, Rozzychan.
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org.
Public domain.
Intestinal villi through microscope , Jamil Baza.
https: //commons.m.wikimedia.org. Creative
Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
Here, with my father’s microscope, light
still played a role, though rather than an
intruder to be avoided it was harnessed,
powered and projected across the instrument’s
stage. In the most blunt terms, this
microscope and its samples underscored
for me the idea that within every object,
every centimeter of space, there could exist
concentrated and complex information:
an archive.
This is a theme that has helped the development
of virtually every scientific discipline:
improve our way of looking and
richness awaits. Chemistry has given us the
elements and their interactions, biology the
exotic zoos of our cells, geology the mythic
historical saga of our planet, like sparkling
tree rings running through our mountain
ranges, and physics the quanta of gravity
and space. In each case, the evidence supporting
these observations has always been
around us, readily available; the greatest
breakthroughs in scientific history have
not come from unearthing some new elixir,
but from our development of new ways to
look more clearly, more deeply at what has
always been around us. Each step in our
improved understanding has come from
an innovation in how we look.
In the case of cantera, a stone employed
in architecture all over the world, at once
both common and clearly replete with
archival density, our history and evolution
of looking has been partially shaped by the
man Antonio del Castillo Patiño; a 19th
century geologist, he was responsible for
founding the Geological Institute in Mexico
and imparting to the national discipline
of geology standards and character apart
from its utility in mining. In other words,
he established the formal archival institution
that assisted Studio davidpompa in
seeing and appreciating the archival nature
of the stone itself, a character of the stone
that goes far beyond its obvious qualities,
like hue, sturdiness, texture.
Among the most interesting aspects of
Patiño’s biography is the fact that his exact
birthdate is unknown, or was unknown for
many years, due to a fire around the year
1860 at the archives of the church of Cutzamala,
a fire whose own origins remain
in dispute. In reading about Patiño and his
Institute, I also came across the story of
Parícutin — not a man, but a cinder cone
volcano, several hundred kilometers beyond
CDMX. Parícutin earned itself reasonable
fame in the 1940s, when it first emerged
from the cornfield of farmer Dionisio Pulido,
allowing its geological development to
be fully observed, to be looked at, a novel
scientific opportunity that naturally caught
the attention of the Institute that Patiño
had founded.
Left image: Image use courtesy of the Geological Institute of Mexico. Right image: Ordonez, Ezequiel (1943). Parícutin [Birth certificate of the Parícutin volcano] [Photograph]. Historical Collection of the Institute of Geology, UNAM.
That novelty eventually earned Parícutin
distinction as one of “the seven natural
wonders of the world,” and during its
activity over nearly a decade, it forced
the evacuation of all residents of the two
towns upon which its lava encroached.
Today, the church San Juan Parangaricutiro,
half-encased in igneous remnants,
once blazing liquid fire but now hardened
black stone, remains evidence and memory
of Parícutin. In reading about the man and
the volcano, I came across photographs
of a document that Patiño’s Institute of
Geology issued to certify and memorialize
Parícutin when it appeared in 1943, nearly
half a century after Patiño’s death, with
references to these papers, appropriately,
one thinks, as a “birth certificate.”
It is therefore correct to say that the man
who had no birth certificate, thanks to a
fire at a church in Michoacán, established
the institution later responsible for the
birth certificate of Parícutin the volcano
— a volcano that very well could produce
cantera, a volcanic toba — which announced
itself and earned its lasting notoriety
by consuming a different Michoacán
church in lava.
History amasses itself in layers. But it is
dependent upon us to look for it.
***
As we consider Studio davidpompa’s
work and its resonance with the meaning
of “archives,” we should finally take
a moment to consider exactly not the
cantera. Consider, instead, the light itself.
When it comes to the question of archives
and preservation of the past, where we
come from and how all those intervening
moments have unfolded, stone, it turns
out, is not the enduring substance we’re so
tempted to believe it to be.
Instead, as modern physics has taught us,
light is the most lasting means for preservation,
bypassing all friction and decay,
with the power to show us a dimension
of history beyond any other record. Stone
always, eventually, will turn to dust. Light
and time, however, have a different relationship:
Last year, the first photographs
from the James Webb Space Telescope
showed us that light has no destiny to
expire. In the Webb’s deep field image,
published July 12, 2022, the telescope
observed light over 13 billion years old,
the most ancient evidence of our universe’s
existence, cementing light’s role as the
truest archival substance. The photo, as it
is, is the closest document to a birth certificate
for the formation of the universe as is
currently in human hands.
Cantera texture, Michoacán, Mexico, 2023.
“Webb’s First Deep Field,” captured by the James Webb Space Telescope and released by NASA and the Space Telescope Science Institute into the public domain on July 12, 2022.
In the case of these cantera light sculptures,
Studio davidpompa has taken
something utterly solid, embedded with
memory, and married it to a source of
light, something fleeting and intangible.
The stone draws our attention and demands
that we acknowledge its power as
an archive, so we imagine the past. But the
light itself may ultimately be the element
responsible for preserving the phenomenon
of “now” for some distant, searching
future. There’s some comfort in that fact,
I think, like a secret of the room where one
lives, understood for the first time.
Alex Slotnick
Washington, D.C.
February 26, 2023
ABOUT ALEXANDER SLOTNICK AND THE COLLABORATION
Alexander Slotnick is from Virginia Beach, Virginia, and now lives in Washington, D.C. His fiction,
essays, and interviews have previously appeared in The Sewanee Review, The White Review,
Meridian, and The Distance, among others.
In writing about this exhibition and the volcanic toba, I found myself unable to resist trying
to unweave the rich, coiled strands of meaning that Studio davidpompa has so masterfully
concentrated into these objects of design — ideas and observations, manifest as physical
expressions. Through unweaving, the essay’s aim is not to dispel the mystery of the designs and the
nature of the cantera, but to use language and story to give each of us, the viewers, new tools for
furthering the contemplation that the studio’s work has brilliantly begun.
www.alexanderslotnick.com
