Mirror Mirage
[ the Mirror Mask ]

A body looking at itself and being reflected on itself.
The space helmet was on her head. She could feel the weight of the astronaut mask through her neck nodding movements, like a pendulum in gravity cero balance. The image of the Chacmool was attached to the wall by a magnet, she imagined the magnetic field holding the image. The slow movement of her neck allowed her to see the Chacmoolreflected on the helmet mask; upside down, in non-gravity.

She knew how to see the dream, to do it she started not dreaming. She had to train perception to see herself. She looked for days into an obsidian mirror wearing the mask and talked to her reflection explaining her history to her other shelves. Like in parallel timelines, she was able to dream herself into other many different forms of matter. Mutation is necessary to change the loop of time, if not you will be always dreaming yourself like you are repeating the same history over and over again. 

You cannot possess an image.
Her head turned to one side completely to inhale. She controlled meticulously her breathing and looked her reflection on the obsidian mirror making her reflection disappear, becoming nothing, just the smooth darkness of the obsidian rock. She repeated the movement for long, in a thoughtful loop that reverb her image until the reflection turned into two red eyes, the two portals of transformation.
Seeing yourself, looking at yourself, being yourself, yourself being you, yourself seeing you, your reflecting you, in a loop of atomic reflections, you seeing yourself.
The reflected light preserved many or most of the detailed physical characteristics of the original light but inverted. Mirrors reflect your atoms but in reverse. You, upside down. A mirage, the external form, which the mirror reflects back in a reversed symmetry and perspective. She tried to unfold to became the reflection but she could not.
A mirror is door to another state it is a technology to become others.
The mirror is the labyrinth of duplicates. As Borges said mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of people...

Any invention or technology is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies. This extension demands new ratios or equilibriums among the other organs and extensions of the body.

A reflection is a map of the original body but not the body.
She held the polished and smooth surface and looked again the image of her reflection. A mirage on the speculum, “speculation”, that originally was the observation of the stars on the same surface. 
Reflection is the paradoxical mirage of trans-becoming.


* Alfonso Borragán is a multidisciplinary artist from Cantabria (Spain). He lives and works in London where he is lecturer at the Arts and Science program (BASc) at the University College London.