We see our bodies change; we feel our skin age. It is all part of life’s cycles: the regeneration of the Earth. It is also evidence of how time moves in the space we inhabit. When did humans realize that time was time? Although there is no exact consensus on when the first clocks and calendars were used, the observation of celestial bodies probably sparked the desire to make sense of our brief existence. 

In the night sky, we witness the glow of extinct stars. Occasionally, we see meteors or eclipses pass by and realize how we move with the Universe. These changes occur because the space of the Universe is in constant expansion. In an entropic impulse, time accelerates. We notice this in our bodies by feeling the passage of days. If the Universe, instead of expanding, contracted, time would slow down, and with it, our memories would fade until we returned to being condensed matter in a boiling cloud. 

Tiempos Pendulares emerge from the intention to imagine other ways of interpreting the flow of time. The works of Natalia Mejía and Lucia Hinojosa engage in a poetic dialogue with the perceived immensity of the cosmos, questioning scientific conventions that, despite their methodological rigor, contain gaps through which speculation is still possible. Both artists challenge the linearity of time, using the circle as a starting point and taking us through space-time in constant extinction and regeneration. 

In her obsession for observing NASA’s digital galaxy observatory, Natalia Mejía highlights how scientific cartographies of the Universe are really mathematical figures translated into images made for our terrestrial understanding. The variation of these numbers accounts for the expansion of the Universe and, therefore, the alteration of time. Thus, Natalia generates spatial layers that seem to stop in time. In her engravings, what appear to be fixed cosmic events enter into a dynamism — by overlaying pedagogical and scientific materials, blown glass spheres and pendulums — revealing multiple dimensions of a narrative always Under Construction, which challenges linear time. 

Simultaneously, Lucía Hinojosa’s Variaciones Lunares lures us to feel the deep time of a planet that turned into a Moon. This reminds of a theory that presumes how the birth of the Moon may have happened millions of years ago from the impact of a primordial planet called Theia with Earth, for lying in the same orbit. By capturing long-exposure photographs, Lucía takes us through the sensitive journey the Moon leaves on its trace. Through sound, she also activates a fossilized language of the moon that reveals its internal memory and vibrant influence on the seasonal changes on Earth, far beyond its conception as a static satellite. 

This mutual curiosity of Natalia and Lucía reveals, from their artistic practices, the chaotic and delicated behavior of the cosmos, the Moon, and the Earth, to configure a celestial dance that evidences the inextricable relationship between each body where the human is not the center but part of the vastness of celestial bodies in this space-time