Andrea Galvani © Still from The Void Migrates to the Surface, 2025
High-definition multichannel video installation, 42-inch color monitor,
limestone, granite, marble, quartz, pyrite, resin, metal plate, and electricity.
Dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Galería CURRO

THE VOID MIGRATES TO THE SURFACE

What happens when time loses unity, direction, and objectivity? When the dilation of time engenders a completely different temporal order? What would life look like if we were able to extend its duration? If we could achieve resurrection?

Andrea Galvani: The Void Migrates to the Surface is a monumental immersion that coalesces around time—more fractal than linear—determinism, and living beings. Galvani’s project confronts urgent themes that characterize and define this historical moment—the climate crisis, mass extinction, epochal geological change, migration, biodiversity, and humanity’s responsibility within this context. Above all, this project centers our attention on life itself. Life’s inexorable temporal cycle becomes a philosophical, cosmic contemplation of transformation, transience, death, and rebirth.

Described by the artist as “an experiential space,” Galvani’s multichannel videosculptural installation crystallizes a powerful action: extending the short lives of twenty different species of rare and endangered butterflies from a few weeks to 73 years, the global average human life expectancy. Galvani filmed the videos with super-slow motion, highly-sensitive cameras generally employed for scientific research. Shot between 10,000 and 18,000 frames per second, time is thoughtfully and precisely dilated. Seconds become minutes. Prolonging the frame of reference in which butterflies move, their lifetimes are exponentially extended to that of human beings. Simultaneously, we as viewers synchronize with the time of the butterflies. Inverting the perspective of spectator and spectacle, what we actually see is time on their scale—the temporal dimension butterflies experience.

Andrea Galvani © The Void Migrates to the Surface, 2025
High-definition multichannel video, 42-inch color monitor, limestone,
granite, marble, quartz, pyrite, resin, metal plate, and electricity;
Artisanal ceramic replicas of extinct apples, metal, concrete and silk.
Courtesy the artist and Galería CURRO

Andrea Galvani © Still from The Void Migrates to the Surface, 2025
Courtesy the artist and Galería CURRO

These monumental minimalist works are comprised by just two elements, two material components amplifying their temporal character: casts of large, thousand-year-old sacred stones from the Andes Mountains that support high-definition color screens with videos of splendid butterflies that ascend and descend repeatedly on the stone. Tiny scales fall like iridescent dust, glittering vibrant matter leaving an evanescent trail behind. We perceive in these works a delicate, natural aging process—the subtle passage of time inscribed upon wings that slowly bend and fray from friction, air’s soft resistance. Merging nature and technology, deep geological time and a brief flash of spirit, the artist invites us into a new cosmology.

Woven throughout the videosculptural installation like a colorful forest, Galvani’s prodigious sculptures The Lost Garden of Heaven illuminate invisible synergies between different life forms and the richness of ecological entanglements. Towers of botanical archaeology, The Lost Garden of Heaven is composed by life-size, artisanal ceramic replicas of lost and extinct heirloom apples reproduced through studies of historical agricultural records. Most of these apples had not been tasted for over 100 years, some were rescued from the last known trees of their kind.

Andrea Galvani © The Void Migrates to the Surface, 2025
Audio sculpture with restored archival recordings of extinct birds,
speakers inside a massive boulder cast; limestone, granite, marble, quartz,
pyrite, resin, and electricity; Artisanal ceramic replicas of extinct apples,
metal, concrete and silk. Dimensions variable with architecture.
Courtesy the artist and Galería CURRO

Andrea Galvani © The Void Migrates to the Surface [Blue Morpho], 2025
High-definition video, 42-inch color monitor, limestone, granite, marble, quartz,
pyrite, resin, metal plate, and electricity. 51 x 75.6 x 39.4 inches / 130 x 192 x 100 cm
Courtesy the artist and Galería CURRO

Andrea Galvani © The Lost Garden of Heaven, 2024-2025
Artisanal ceramic replicas of extinct apples, metal, concrete and silk
Dimensions variable. Partial exhibition view and detail
Courtesy the artist and Galería CURRO

Andrea Galvani © The Void Migrates to the Surface, 2025
Audio sculpture with restored archival recordings of extinct birds,
speakers inside a massive boulder cast; limestone, granite, marble, quartz,
pyrite, resin, and electricity; Artisanal ceramic replicas of extinct apples,
metal, concrete and silk. Dimensions variable with architecture.
Courtesy the artist and Galería CURRO

Celebrating the revival of these vital plants, Galvani is working with farmers, ecologists, pomologists, horticulturalists, historians, and “apple detectives” to memorialize hundreds of rare and extinct varieties through his sculptures. The Lost Garden of Heaven tells a profound story of cultural exchange, Indigenous ethnobotany, stewardship, the fragility and resilience of our living planet. Each column honors acts of resistance against commercial crop homogenization and soil sterilization, ensuring the survival of diverse trees that nourish and bloom the most prolific fruit of northern temperate regions.

With The Void Migrates to the Surface, Galvani constructs a new ecosystem—large-scale boulders, botanical monuments, advanced technology, a fragile architecture of natural elements, displaced and suspended, songs of extinct birds mysteriously reverberate. Like echoes resounding from another dimension, Galvani’s audio piece Resurrection I emanates from a massive megalith in the center of the space. Meticulously restored from archival recordings dating back to 1907, Resurrection I reanimates melancholic, hauntingly beautiful birdsongs and calls from species that have disappeared from the planet. Sounds that have fallen silent in extinction—a state of absence more permanent than death—radiate from the rock, surge from the ground. Like a chorus that expands in an empty church, their resonance is a resurrection drawing upon the auditory sense as our primary connection with the world beyond—the first that arrives in the womb and the last to go as we pass on. Galvani’s work is a complex yet lucid reflection on the transference of time into a conscious phenomenon. The Void Migrates to the Surface takes on a clear political, philosophical, and existential direction—life is an event that embodies time in a continuous natural flow, without perimeters.

Developed over three years, The Void Migrates to the Surface was produced between Mexico, Peru, and the United States with the collaboration of major institutions including the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics and Macaulay Library at Cornell University, McGuire Center for Lepidoptera & Biodiversity, and the American Museum of Natural History in New York. It was made possible with the generous support of The Shifting Foundation, Los Angeles.

Andrea Galvani © The Void Migrates to the Surface, 2025
High-definition multichannel video, 42-inch color monitor, limestone,
granite, marble, quartz, pyrite, resin, metal plate, and electricity;
Artisanal ceramic replicas of extinct apples, metal, concrete and silk.
Dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Galería CURRO

Andrea Galvani © The Void Migrates to the Surface [Cattleheart], 2025
High-definition video, 42-inch color monitor, limestone, granite, marble, quartz,
pyrite, resin, metal plate, and electricity. 42.5 x 55 x 29.5 inches / 108 x 140 x 75 cm
Courtesy the artist and Galería CURRO

Andrea Galvani © The Void Migrates to the Surface [Postman], 2025
High-definition video, 42-inch color monitor, limestone, granite, marble, quartz,
pyrite, resin, metal plate, and electricity. 45.7 x 63 x 41 inches / 116 x 160 x 104 cm
Courtesy the artist and Galería CURRO