Umbrales de Ensueño
‘Umbrales de Ensueño’(Dream Arches) was selected for A Cel Obert 2025 in Tortosa, Spain — a festival that fosters public engagement with the city’s architectural heritage by activating underutilized historic spaces through ephemeral artistic interventions.
The installation is set within the Patio de Sant Jordi i Sant Domènec — the central courtyard of the Reials Collegis complex, a Renaissance ensemble considered among the most remarkable in Catalonia. Surrounded by rhythmic arcades that rise in three tiers, the courtyard reveals a layered order of stone and light. The repetition of arches, shifting from broad semicircular spans below to more subdued forms above, lends the space a tangible sense of material weight and temporal depth — an atmosphere where history feels physically present in the air and stone.
Conceived under this year’s theme, “Dreams,” the installation reimagines the arch that defines the courtyard as something fleeting and immaterial. Unbound from its structural logic, it softens into a threshold of light and air. Layered and suspended, the arches gently float above the courtyard— a dreamlike field where reality is filtered, distorted, and gently blurred.
‘Umbrales de Ensueño’ is composed of multiple translucent curtains in white reflective organza. Spanning the courtyard, the curtains form a subtle radial pattern, gathering toward one corner and releasing toward the other. Arches of varying scales are cut from the fabric — monumental ones like palace gates, others small enough for a child to pass, a few simply hovering: small windows suspended in midair. Behind one arch, another. Sightlines slip and overlap, silhouettes flicker and dissolve. Clarity and blur rest side by side.
When a breeze passes through, the fabric stirs gently and the arches seem to lose their rigidity. The curtains drift and fold with a slow, uncertain rhythm — sometimes advancing toward the viewer, sometimes retreating away. The space itself begins to move, its boundaries wavering like reflections on water. In these moments, the arches appear almost liquid, their outlines bending and melting in the light — as if reality were slipping for an instant into a dream.
The installation catches light with delicacy. As the sun moves across the courtyard, the translucent organza shifts between translucence and reflection, turning the air itself into a luminous field. Layers of fabric overlap and scatter light in subtle gradations, so that brightness and shadow seem to circulate through the space. At certain hours, the surfaces take on a silvery sheen; the arches, veils, and reflections merge into one another until depth becomes uncertain. In this encounter, the new and the old, the solid and the ephemeral, coexist — the fabric breathing within the stone, the dream folded inside the real.
As light shifts and people pass through, the fabric stirs, casting faint reflections and almost-arches that tremble on stone and column. One may be framed, then hidden; seen below or glimpsed from above. Like the dream itself, the installation offers no fixed route—only the desire to recognize, to connect, to remember. And in the end, to drift within a state that resists resolution.
