Between Light and Darkness

2023, Hill with St. John’s Wort and other plants, publication, NHT, Innsbruck. - https://www.neueheimat.tirol/projekte/innsbruck-margarethe-drexel/

It would seem that all urban renewal processes are designed to flatten the terrain, to remove hazardous obstacles from the ground, and thus ensure that pedestrians can walk without the risk of stumbling. A flat city is the perfect place to wander without having to look around, creating an alliance between what feels safe to us and that which becomes invisible.

Introducing an interruption in public space is, therefore, a gesture that leads us to proceed with caution, to look and question the reason for that discontinuity in the smooth movement of pedestrians. This mound of earth is then a reintroduction of the natural, the abrupt, and the historical. Until a few years ago, the presence of these mounds interrupting the continuity of a place might have made us think that it was a freshly covered tomb, challenging us about what lies beneath, about the memory inscribed in the bowels of the earth, about what is no longer in front of us to be contemplated; despite these attempts to conceal, the hill persists as a promise of return, as a testimony that resists being flattened.

This mound, covered with St. John’s Wort, seeks to indicate the place of an absence, to conjure spirits from the past, and also to heal a historical wound. We all know that this plant, a solar metaphor and a symbol of fire, has been used for magical and medicinal purposes. We know that it is used to ward off unwanted spirits, to relieve the pains of menstruating bodies, to aid sleep, and to alleviate the suffering of anxiety and melancholy. The plant also connects us with the seasons and signals, in its blooming, the longest day of the year, the one that presents us with victory, always temporary, in our war against darkness.

- Víctor Albarracín Llanos