TEMPORAL IMAGES OF WATER
Flowing Between Nature and Culture
June 28.2026, Sofia, Bulgaria, National Gallery
July 3. 2026, Varna, Bulgaria, City Gallery
July 9. 2026, Bourgas, Bulgaria, City Gallery
All my talks will be about my current and upcoming art projects, on water and its human and non-human encounters.
Think about this:
How do we see water? What are the images of water?
Why do I call them temporal?
Moisture on a rock, a tsunami wave, a synaptic spark, a geyser, the pupil of an eye, a cloud in the sky, the blue color of the planet, a sip and a spill on the face, the Hudson River, the white spot on the globe named Greenland, a cup of coffee, a glass of wine, an AI answer, a memory in our brain, a round stone on the Black Sea shore, the skin of your grandmother, a flower, the taste in your mouth, the reflection of your face and the city, the shape of a fish, the warmth of a flame, the sound of a waterfall, the smell of rain, the fruit you ate this morning—and this text itself.
All these—and a myriad more—are images, traces, and flow-events of water. Yet there are many others that lie beyond our perception, even beyond our ability to hypothesize about them. Water has its own “I,” independent from us and from everything else. It follows its own acausal path through the world, and the same holds true for its temporal images.
The primordial idea of an image comes from water. Light is one part of that image, and water is the other—not only as reflection, but as the very possibility of seeing through.
It is around these thoughts that I have created the art projects I will present here. My artworks are themselves temporal images of water. (I am not always sure whether they belong more to nature or to culture, because the concept of “nature” is itself a cultural construct. But that is another conversation about “us” and everything that is not “us.”)
All of my works are reflections born from hours, days, and months of observing the Hudson River—from Hudson Falls down to the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge between Brooklyn and Staten Island.
UNDAE FLUMINIS.
It is an installation that embodies the flow of water.
Project dimensions: 50 m × 20 m to 200 m × 100 m (depending on the natural conditions of the waterway).
Project description:
A mesh of optical fibers, each one sealed inside a microtube containing air that makes the fiber buoyant. The light source is a cool LCD blue, powered by a floating battery mounted on a buoy at one side of the mesh. The mesh is anchored to the bottom of the waterway or to the shores.
The natural movement of the water—its waves and currents—causes the optical fibers to sway and dance, creating an ever-changing, uncontrollable image of flow itself. The artist sets up the conditions and then steps aside, allowing the water to present itself in an acausal way. Nothing in this work is predictable: not the speed of the current, the changing natural light, the shifting transparency of the water as sediments and debris pass through, the wind, or the complex interactions of all these elements.
The project has already been tested on the Stony Brook River in New York State. My team is currently in negotiations with the Brooklyn municipal authorities to install it during the summer of 2027 in the East River at Dumbo Park, between the Manhattan Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge.