In 2025, I chose to perform a tender sabotage on history. I took an antique glass shade, a silent relic from the era of kerosene lamps, and I shattered it with intention. There is a profound intimacy in breaking something whole to discover its parts. This was not an act of destruction, but a purposeful deconstruction of time. I selected only the shards that possessed the strength to carry our past forward into a new light.

This lamp functions as a solitary planet within a curious universe. The shade itself is the core, but it is no longer smooth or predictable. It bears the weight of our collective memory, locked in monochrome glimpses of human striving. We see a man undergoing a hair transplant under the relentless gaze of the media, a frozen testament to our vanity and our deep fear of decay. Beside him floats an advertisement for a modern moped from 1964. It represents our old dreams of mobility and freedom, now held still as a fossilized moment. The man seeks to repair his exterior, while the moped promises an escape that has long since dissolved into nostalgia.

Orbiting this planet are the colored satellites. They are the only sources of pigment in a landscape otherwise ruled by the grey of memory. These satellites cast their vibrant hues out into the void, serving as a reminder that while our history may feel tattered, life itself remains a kaleidoscope of motion. They are like small, cheerful observers who refuse to let the planet slip into silence. They splash crimson, gold, and emerald light across the man’s surgery, as if mocking the gravity of our worldly concerns with a cosmic wink.

What is this work trying to articulate? Perhaps it suggests that we are all small planets built from the fragments of those who came before us. We are broken heirlooms glued together by necessity, decorated with old magazines and modern insecurities. We are a strange fusion of the ancient and the novel. It is precisely within these fractures, where the glass has failed, that the light finds its way through. This is a tribute to the imperfect. It is an invitation to shatter the old so that we might finally see the stars.

The Mnemosyne Signal

In the resonance of Greek mythology, Mnemosyne is the goddess of memory and the mother of the Muses. This title speaks to the shattered recollection of the antique glass and the mysterious frequency these satellites broadcast into the dark. It is an unsolved enigma about who we were in 1964, and what we are becoming in the light of 2025.