«Dance of Light illustrates the ambiguity of origins overshadowed by the quest for understanding. The short video is a montage of what appears to be microscopic aquatic life that transforms in its new context. The moving images become fireworks and strands of silk floating across the screen. In Bilbao’s own words, “the origin’s abstraction can give rise to alternatives for the future since it implies the liberation of meaning.” These blurred finitudes breach boundaries, weighing the infrastructure of human time against one that is nonlinear. Crucially, light and water are already inscribed with the keeping of time; the shifting of the sun and of the tide. For Bilbao to place these two concepts at the fore of her temporally-focused practice is a well-considered move. Bilbao doubles down on the all-too-human desire to make sense of the world. “Established logics,” however, are only ever approximations as the issue of how the world came to be is still unresolved.

Bilbao hones in on just one aspect of such meaning-making in order to reduce a giant question mark to a more manageable scale. Temporal understanding is fractured by her rehabilitation of found footage. The desire to bridge the gap between analog and digital technologies is a consistent pulse in Bilbao’s practice as she uses archaic forms within a contemporary context. Her rituals emerge without beginning or end, as she participates in an ongoing phenomenological investigation of the moving image.» By Reilly Davidson*

*Excerpt from the essay "An Ongoing Phenomenological Investigation of the Moving Image", written by the curator for the screening FOUR QUARTETS that took place at the artist-run space Field Projects, New York, Nov. 2022. Reilly Davidson is a writer and curator based in New York. She is also the partner/director at Shoot the Lobster.