Kalb al Akrab

Here is where induction and deduction collide — where trails become spots, and particles, the cosmos. The blue line, seen from another angle of the universe, appears red; everything branches and explodes, leaving its traces behind. Not trajectories — what we are witnessing is an obstacle course, an aimless drift, proceeding without deliberation towards a place nor precision towards an object but wandering here and there, as everything is intertwined; being here is like being there and vice versa. In this kind of hic et nunc in which we operate — that is, our existence in space and time — our being does not indicate a mere spatial location but, as German philosopher Martin Heidegger put it: something more ambiguous and complex. Here is Antares between the chords, Kalb al Akrab, sixteenth brightest star and heart of the constella- tion, radiating its dazzling light on a tendinous, contracted leg just as it kisses the seventeenth major Arcana. Star and body on opposite walls — just as Gaia placed Orion and Scorpio at the antipodes — make them respectively winter and summer, however inextricably linked by cosmic becoming; star and body drip the same blood while fragments like scattered meteorites are seized by a spidery hand. It snatches and relaxes its grip as the universe pulsates and continues in flux, everything flowing and ro- tating, colors marking patterns of inter-astral space. The functional is in full harmony with abstraction; logic takes flight; geometries incite chaos instead of asserting order. An explosion of infinite deflagrations. A shell was found on Mars, the planet that references Kalb al Akrab — the so-called constellation of Scorpio containing a vast number of stars, systems, stellar clouds and clusters — that which it is not, yet, at the same time, that which it comes from and to which it remains attracted. Everything is now a vortex. Text by Domenico de Chirico, Milan, 14 October 2021.