Permanently
shadowed
Composed of two layers - a green nylon grid in the background framed by hand - applied gold leaf, and a large-scale charcoal drawing on washed cotton, the work interlaces two coeval visual genealogies: the subterranean representations of Jerusalem created by Scottish artist William Simpson (1823–1899) during British expeditions in Palestine around 1869, overlaid with a staged illustration of the Moon made by Scottish engineer James Nasmyth and published in his book The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite (1874). Both images emerged within the same historical horizon, the second half of the nineteenth century, when imperial expansion and positivist science converged into a single promise of truth: measuring and representing as inseparable acts of knowing and conquering. The archaeological excavations carried out by British officer Charles Warren in Jerusalem in the late 1860s, together with William Simpson’s visual documentation, helped define the notion of an “imperial underground.” Warren conducted these explorations on behalf of the newly formed Palestine Exploration Fund, an imperial pseudo-scientific endeavor dedicated to uncovering evidence of Solomon’s Temple and the tomb of Jesus. Their work sought to bring to light the city’s ancient JudeoChristian past, hidden beneath its exhausted Ottoman present, contributing to the ideological groundwork for Britain’s later conquest of Palestine during World War I.
Unlike traditional imperial imagery, which conveyed control and panoramic dominion, Simpson’s sketches portrayed the British presence in this territory as lost, vulnerable, and confined to spaces they neither knew nor understood. In those same years, in 1874, in his volume The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite, James Nasmyth presented a detailed exploration of the lunar surface, arguing that its features, craters, mountains, ridges, were formed primarily through volcanic activity and internal contraction. Simpson and Nasmyth share the same logic: staging as a means of producing evidence, fabricating images that use fiction as scientific proof and artifice as a source of knowledge. Simpson transforms the archaeological explorations beneath Jerusalem into scenes where British light pierces Eastern darkness, weaving a narrative that merges science, religion, and power. Nasmyth, confronted with the technical impossibility of photographing the Moon, built plaster models that he then photographed, translating a material construction into alleged visual truth. In Victorian England, both the underground and the sky became projection fields for the same modern impulse.
The desire for dominion accompanied the rise of archaeology, mining, and industrial infrastructure, where “descending” also meant conquering. Within this same visual logic, the tunnels of Jerusalem and the lunar craters were conceived as spaces to be illuminated - empty terrains awaiting translation into an imperial language of light.
In the large central banner, we find a charcoal drawing of a scene of the so-called Wilson’s Arch made by Simpson and published in the Illustrated London News in 1869, in which an editorial intervention reversed the source of light: in the original watercolor, the lamp is held by an Arab man; in the printed version, the illumination shifts to the British explorer. This minimal yet decisive alteration condenses an entire politics of vision. Behind the large banner, Estrada reproduces the ornamental frames and grids of John Tallis & Co’s map of ancient Palestine, using gold leaf - a material that, in her words, “resists the gesture and is difficult to control.” As visitors move through the exhibition space, they also encounter three realistic maps of lunar pits taken from a satellite atlas of the Moon - Mare Tranquillitatis Pit (left wall), Marius Hills Pit (central wall), and Mare Insularum Pit (right wall) — which expand and complicate the reflection. Also drawn in charcoal on linen, these maps chart emptiness, organize absence, and transform surface into territory. Each work contains fragments of pyrite, often called “fool’s gold” for its resemblance to real gold that deceives miners during extraction, adding another layer to the exhibition: the constant, though differently represented, impulse to drill and dig. Fragments of the past resurface in the present as lingering shadows; historical images, reproduced and edited, pulse with a displaced rhythm.
Within this oscillation, the archive ceases to be a stable repository and becomes shifting terrain, where narratives remain unresolved and the light of empire still flickers across the surface of the paper. In this unstable ground, Estrada opens a threshold for speculation - not as futuristic fantasy, but as a critical gesture that imagines other ways of seeing. By reconfiguring the visual architectures of conquest, her work transforms the act of mapping into a field of possibility. As of 2019, 324 permanently shadowed regions are known on the Moon - craters of eternal darkness. These pits, naturally hidden and impossible to observe directly, resist the obsession with discovery and the drive toward extractivists missions.
