The City of Immortals
Simon Victor

After exploring and absorbing the city’s atmosphere of the writer who has inspired and guided him to reflect about many different existential concepts such as mortality-time-duality-above-below, Simon Victor, British multi-disciplinary artist based in Austin, USA, presented the site-specific installation The City of the Immortals. Victor transformed the Políglota Room into a different dimension through optic effects and games of reflection and projection in addition to video-art, animation, mapping and ambient music that created a very dreamy and trippy atmosphere.

Victor made the spectators submerge into spaces and non-spaces like Borges did it with his poetry:

MIRRORS
I, who felt the horrors of mirrors / Not only in front of the impenetrable crystal / Where there ends and begins, uninhabitable, / An impossible space of reflections, // But of gazing even on water that mimics / The other blue in its depth of sky, / That at times gleams back the illusory flight / Of the inverted bird, or that ripples, // And in front of the silent surface / Of subtle ebony whose polish shows / Like a repeating dream the white / Of something marble or something rose, // Today at the tip of so many and perplexing / Wandering years under the varying moon, / I ask myself what whim of fate / Made me so fearful of a glancing mirror. // Mirrors in metal, and the masked / Mirror of mahogany that in its mist / Of a red twilight hazes / The face that is gazed on as it gazes, // I see them as infinite, elemental / Executors of an ancient pact, / To multiply the world like the act / Of begetting. Sleepless. Bringing doom. // They prolong this hollow, unstable world / In their dizzying spider’s-web; / Sometimes in the afternoon they are blurred / By the breath of a man who is not dead. // The crystal spies on us. If within the four / Walls of a bedroom a mirror stares, / I’m no longer alone. There is someone there. // In the dawn reflections mutely stage a show. / Everything happens and nothing is recorded / In these rooms of the looking glass, / Where, magicked into rabbis, we / Now read the books from right to left. // Claudius, king of an afternoon, a dreaming king, / Did not feel it a dream until that day / When an actor shewed the world his crime // In a tableau, silently in mime. // It is a strange dream, and to have mirrors / Where the commonplace, worn-out repertory / Of every day may include the illusory / Profound globe that reflections scheme. // God (I keep thinking) has taken pains / To design that ungraspable architecture / Reared by every dawn from the gleam / Of a mirror, by darkness from a dream.  // God has created nighttime, which he arms / With dreams, and mirrors, to make clear / To man he is a reflection and a mere / Vanity. Therefore these alarms.

Music collaboration with Antonio Boyadjian