A Knot That Is Also a Star is an expanded cinema installation, a real-time visual act where light becomes a surface and objects become performers. An optical ritual that seeks not to show, but to summon.

Based on an archive of slides taken in Querétaro, Mexico, during the 1960s by amateur photographer Federico Lozada, this piece proposes a sensorial drift: the projector’s light passes through constantly rotating objects, blurring the images and opening up reading thresholds toward a narrative that seeks not clarity, but reverberation.

The image becomes a spectral body, a distortion, a vibrating residue. The sound, coming from a modified version of the Shutter soundtrack (Bangjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom), acts as an emotional medium, sustaining a trance-like state that connects the viewer with a nostalgia that doesn’t belong to them, yet drags them along as if remembering something they never experienced.

Here, remembering isn’t looking back, but rather opening cracks in time. As Derrida suggests in The Spectres of Marx, for something of the future to emerge, it is necessary to work through mourning: to build a dam from which the ghosts of the past filter out, not as fixed replicas, but as moving presences.

A knot that is also a star is not just an intervened image: it is a vibrant field where the archive breathes, the reflection multiplies, and the light—as it passes through the objects—weaves a choreography of appearances that we can barely name.

Text by Natalia Colina