Contributing Artists

Pedro Guerra

Exhibition Statement as Preserved in the SUGS/SITE Archives:

Do you like it here? Is the air fine?

I arrived in Chicago at the end of summer. Cicadas greeted me first—I had never heard them, never imagined them—until I stepped into that buzzing season when two broods collided. Afternoons pulsed with their sound, a ceiling of noise without a ceiling, only cycles, spirals, returns.

Then came the ceiling fans. In Santiago, where I’m from, they’re rare. The climate is steady; I’m used to unbroken ceilings. Here, fans turn slow galaxies overhead, pulling air into motion.

Both—the fans indoors and the insects outside—became the small machinery of my days, circling and recircling. When life’s landscape shifts, you notice these minor orbits: things spinning around you until you fall into their rhythm. Like learning a language—you adapt, adopt, grow new skills, new rotations.

Yet centrifugal force still flings me outward. At the center—the still axis—there’s a punctum, a fixed point where spinning reveals something else: a quiet field where transformation occurs. Sometimes the object changes. Sometimes the observer. Sometimes it’s language itself, turning endlessly, showing new faces each revolution.

Cicadas cycle, ceiling fans spin, stray thoughts orbit, and sometimes their circles meet—briefly—before spiraling away again.