-1 Digital Lab-1 Digital Lab

Alexandra Martens Serrano, 2026

Illuminations from the Edge emerges from an investigation of the “reboot” as a ritual of interruption of previous scripts. What once appeared as a cyclical reset is now reconsidered through the language of rupture, while acknowledging that the reboot never entails a clean brake from its previous iterations but often carries familiar systems of control with it.

Martens Serrano’s research treats explosions as both material and metaphor: devices that stage beginnings, operate as “domestic Big Bangs,” and turn moments of violence or celebration into spectacle. In this light, spectacular explosions become a spatial and political operation, which reveal an underlying system that conditions how we see, gather, respond, and redistribute bodies within fields of visibility and control. As fireworks are regulated, repurposed, or withdrawn, other aerial technologies are also mobilized, displacing combustion with calculation. In turn, explosions produce new constellations of visibility that script what and who is seen, tracked, or targeted from afar.

The work references torito pinto, a pyrotechnic spectacle from traditional Central American festivities in which an artisanal, bull-shaped structure is adorned with fireworks, set alight, and carried around. Illuminations from the Edge reframes this proto-technology of ignition as an interface between body and apparatus. Carried, worn, and animated, the torito pinto transforms the body into both operator and surface of combustion, giving life to a hybrid identity that is part animal, part human, and part machine. It stages a choreography in which agency and exposure collapse into one another, this pyrotechnics oscillates at the threshold between illumination and obscurity, as the celebratory and the hazardous become indistinguishable.

Across the work, explosions and cycles are understood as spatial and political operations that blur bodies, unsettle social contexts, and suggest metamorphosis as both escape and erasure. The reboot is no longer a mere return but a reconfiguration, in an era of beginnings that already foreshadow, and are often contaminated by, their own potential ends.

Alexandra Martens Serrano is an Amsterdam-based Salvadoran artist and researcher. Working through hybrid methods that combine material practices and emerging technologies, she investigates liminality, interdependence, and polyvocal realities in formation. Her work examines how knowledge is articulated, translated, and circulated across cultural, technological, and ecological systems.

Drawing on philosophies from the Global South and critically engaging dominant politics of relation, she superimposes contemporary experience onto layered, non-chronological historical lenses. Her research unfolds as evolving narrative ecosystems, where constellations of sculpture, text, sound, and digital media contaminate, interfere, and cross-pollinate.