A Parallel Planets piece by Unknown
Parallel Planets presents Pilar Zeta
in Falling in Love with the Dark Side of the Universe
Story by Jacintha Yap
in Falling in Love with the Dark Side of the Universe
Story by Jacintha Yap
Mentioned: Stardust, primordial matter, light–years
***
For the drifters,
the stargazers,
those who still believe in falling stars
and a home within the cosmos.
Pilar Zeta believes we are all made of stars.
Her beliefs are an echo of another famous line that has circulated and gained popularity across the borderless Internet. We are all made of stardust – a scientific truth that is often looked at with romantic eyes.
Almost every element on Earth was formed at the heart of a star. Humans, in their primordial form, are stardust. We carry the universe inside of us and imagine, just as we live and interact with the world around us, the universe opens and closes with us. We are galactic bodies filled with light–years of energy.
In Zeta’s collages, the stars shine vividly, lucid bursts of light and a snapshot of history of a time long gone. When we look at the stars, what we see is not the present, but the past. Light years of history suspended in the sky. We see time. Even before we were here, the stars have claimed its space in our home planet.
Unbound by the conventional notions of time and space, Zeta’s human subjects are weightless. They float like planets and defy gravity. There is a certain sense of awe, a pull, reminiscent of The Overview Effect— a cognitive shift that astronauts experience during spaceflight upon seeing Earth in its entirety. The inner world, the universe that we carry within ourselves, starts to reflect on the outer. As within, so without. Whatever is inside manifests on the outside. Zeta’s collages poetically convey how we are human vessels of cosmic energy, each, individual planets in orbit.
She transports us to the world within ourselves, a super-lunary where humans take on celestial forms. They embody the galaxy’s children, becoming personifications of the moon or ephemeral shooting stars. Her faceless subjects do not really have distinct identities. One could speculate that these collages serve as personifications of celestial matter. It seems logical considering the faceless facades of our planets, stars and the moon. But, I like to imagine that instead of removing the human quintessence from her works, Pilar Zeta is instead, exemplifying and magnifying our quintessence.
After all, we are all made of stardust.
Her hypnotic collages are a continuous echo of her celestial beliefs and a reminder of our histories. Could we then count the stars amongst our ancestors?
