Firmamento

The chosen title refers to a biblical conception of the Earth’s makeup: in the Old Testament, it was believed that when God created the Earth, He created a solid dome (the “firmament”) which made up the sky and held the entirety of the visible cosmos. Hirsch’s title is not necessarily religious. Rather, her poetic cosmological reference aims to uncover questions and ideas surrounding human perception, exploring the way the structures of power can be subtle, insidious and imperceptible, as well as brutal and invasive, ranging from historic colonizing dynamics and its legacy as well as technological control to dynamics acting at a personal level.
In trying to restore the complexity of the real, [the] Firmamento video exploits multiple references resulting in images that find their meaning at the end of an engineered construction, unfolding in a selection of decontextualized evocative architectural details, decoded artifacts related to the digital language, the apparent ‘natural condition' of symbolic decorative elements, scientific representations, nature, traces from handmade automatic patterns unwillingly quoting the microscopic life, historic colonialist imagery of the Americas. It is, in a sense, a meditation on the complex (and unequal) harmony of human life across varying temporalities, simultaneously replete with beauty and ugliness.