Patricia Dominguez's work integrates art, science and ecology, drawing from a wide range of research areas including South American spiritual practices, ethnobotany and groundbreaking scientific thinking. Her film project, Three Moons Below (2024), emerged from the Simetría Residency run by CERN which allows artists to spend three weeks between its Geneva headquarters and the European Southern Observatory (ESO) astronomy facilities in Chile. This provided her with access to ESO's equipment as well as CERN's experiments in quantum physics, enabling Dominguez to create her most ambitious film yet, which forms the basis of her installation at Cecilia Brunson Projects in London.

The film’s protagonist, a young woman on a spiritual journey to connect with her entangled particles and other forms of intelligence, is the same as in Dominguez's previous film, Matrix Vegetal, 2022. This time, with her robotic bird companion, they enter theoretical space, consulting with mystical beings and machines on their multidimensional journey. The protagonist develops a capacity to communicate with the machines she encounters, gaining their ability to gaze into the cosmos, detect sub-atomic particles and bring together her entangled particles to facilitate a technologically-aided form of enhanced empathy with all living and celestial beings.

The notion of entanglement, a concept central to quantum physics and future technologies that emphasises the idea that entangled particles remain connected even when separated by vast distances, is foundational to the show. Spiritual and quantum realms are combined in a golden wall relief where the film is installed. Within this are watercolours and the artist’s versions of ancient petroglyphs found in various Latin American deserts. STIR spoke to Dominguez about the show and her ability to engage audiences and work with complex ideas. Edited excerpts of the conversation below.

Akin Oladimeji: Your work is reminiscent of Katie Paterson who has been engaging with science in poetic works. It also reminds me of Simnikiwe Buhlungu who tackles ecology and consults with scientists in her latest work at London’s Chisenhale Gallery. Are there any artistic precedents that inspired this body of work?

Patricia Dominguez: I think I do have a lot of artistic inspirations because during the last few years, there have been artists from Latin America, especially video artists, who are doing interesting work. Maybe like the visual language of Mika Rottenberg or Shana Moulton. Those are artists I admire. But my biggest inspiration for this was more spiritual techniques, or for example spiritual fiction, like the play area and exercises where you can go to these chambers to move the information inside. So especially for this video, they were more like energetic techniques or ideas around interspecies communication.

Akin: You say, in your filmed interview with Emily Steer who's part of your show at Cecilia Brunson Projects, that the film is "like a ritual or meditation and the viewer is invited to go on the journey" with the protagonist and "hopefully get transformed". Are you sure that’s possible given that the film is nearly an hour long, people have lower concentration spans and simply don’t have the time to spend so long at an exhibition unless they are dedicated to the artist.

Patricia: In terms of the video, yes, I never expect anyone, apart from maybe one or two people to watch the whole thing. With a little fragment, you have an experience of at least artistically or fictionally working in this other mode of a spiritual way of seeing life or science. Usually, very few people have the patience or attention span to be interested in seeing it all and that's ok. But that's why it's not like a screening...you can walk around and look at the watercolours, then come back to the film. And I think it's my little hack to rearrange our current use of science and spirituality and maybe that will spark [a] different view of reality. But that, I think, is uncontrollable.

The video has different segments and if you see 10 or 15 minutes of it, for me that’s enough. This is a very tricky question because my videos are this kind of emotional technology that if I'm able to enter the eyes of one person, I can propose a new way of showing reality and that person may be affected. You know, for example, when I was doing a residency in Bolivia in 2019 and they had huge fires nearby, I volunteered to work at a hotel receiving injured animals. I was documenting them with my camera so they could raise funds for medicine. One day a half-blinded toucan arrived and I recorded it on video and this inspired a work of mine, Madre Drone. Several months later, somebody emailed me to say they were dreaming of the birds. I meditate a lot. I have had a long practice of meditation. I think it's very important to sit down and release the tension for the first 20 minutes. First, my mind wanders around and I start breathing mindfully and then I enter deep states. So, hopefully, if people sit down and see the whole video, they can start getting into these states. But first, you need to clean yourself, clean your mind of your thoughts and that's why in the video this entangled being gives the protagonist a broom so she can clean the Earth and herself in order to enter these other states. So even if I'm very aware that the attention span is short these days, I personally try to inhabit the world differently. That's why I live on a farm and I appreciate these slower times because you access other ways of talking to yourself or getting information or thinking about it, but for that, you need to sit down and stop resisting, right? You need to get rid of the need for immediate, fast information.

Akin: That must be why I was asked if I wanted to listen to a separate guided meditation made by the artist before I started the main film. In the film, the robot birds are constantly moving their heads from left to right. You have two such birds in the exhibition perched on plinths and I found their movements eerie. What is the significance of this particular species and their movement?

Patricia: Historically, all my work is linked to ecology, animals, plants and our relationship to them. So after the advanced technological residency I did at CERN, I came back with this kind of ecological warning or ecological concern. These birds were living near my house and I had painted that species before (I studied the botanical and scientific illustration of birds and mammals many years ago at the New York Botanical Garden). I included them in the exhibition when they became roadkill. A friend who’s a taxidermist stuffed them for me. For me, this kind of eerie movement of the birds is to evoke this reality, the ecological reality, this journey to the domination of machines. I think it's like the world is…adopting AI machines completely. So, for me, it's important to have this animal presence to talk about AI’s impact.

Akin: While the exhibition has encouraged me to learn what a sidereal clock is - one that measures the rotation of the earth in relation to the stars, the work Me trago el reloj sideral (I swallow the sidereal clock), 2024, is more obscure. Can you break it down for me and the readers?

Patricia: It’s based on a plaque I got as a gift from an electrician at La Silla Observatory who was the one to introduce me to the Sidereal Clock. I have been trying to deconstruct my calendar and my notions of linear time. So I drew another version of the plaque to think about time in quantum ways. The inscriptions are by me as I have been trying to expand my ideas of the cosmos. I learnt we are constantly receiving low radio frequencies from planets and exoplanets, so these inscriptions are a way to [decode] the messages we are constantly receiving. For example, one inscription says ‘Identificar particulas entrelazadas’ because we have these entangled particles all around the universe. You can be entangled in a dead animal, in the wheel of a car, in a weapon, you never know. Science and spirituality have confirmed we are entangled with particles all around, so I find myself asking: how can I identify this particle and how can I feel or get information from this other part that is also me? So this image shows an invention that can expand our notions of ourselves. Are we only here or are we spread all around the galaxy?

'Three Moons Below' is on view at Cecilia Brunson Projects from September 17 - October 25, 2024.