top of page

Secret Messages

Find David Bowie inside T.S. Elliot

This glass mural, made out of 1,508 glass letters, is hand made through kiln-casting and molding processes. The current installation creates two rectangles of text measuring 62” (wide) x 75.5” (high) and the second one 65.5” (wide) x 54” (high). The position can adapt, like text in a page, to any vertical surface.

The poem is the first part of TS Eliot’s Burnt Norton from his book Four Quartets. Hidden inside, like and encrypted message, you can read (following the colors, Pink, Blue and Yellow, consecutively) a part of the song Space Oddity by David Bowie.


The poem, an ode to the present time as the only possible moment, is used here as an image of Time. The hidden song in the text, Space Oddity, is about a lost astronaut, whose ship cannot go back to Earth (homage to Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001) and it is used in this work as an image of Space. The work functions as a personal image of time and space, trying to convey the uneasiness of existence, in a present that is infinite like the universe is, where we are like that lost astronaut left to our finite destiny.


Project Gallery

Idée Fixe  is a Transdisciplinary Studio of Art and Architecture, run by Cristina Guadalupe Galván.

If in a website you normally find finished objects and products to share, what we are sharing here are more ideas – tested, developed and lived -- and their processes, that in many instances ended up happily physical. The creative process is about experimentation and the life that goes with it. The life and the people.

While building this site I came across a quote that explained it to me much better, by architects Josep Ferrando & Marta Poch, for their Quaderns d´Arquitectura, issue 273, THE THINKING TRADE:

      In a world dominated by images of the finished object and the immediacy of access to multimedia content, this issue of Quaderns sets out to reflect on the role of the architect –by means of their working processes, of the working methods (…) leaving the image of the built project on the background.

For artist Sol LeWitt, the process was also the work:

      The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. (...) It is the process of conception and realization with which the artist is concerned. 

Architect Josep Maria Sostres said something similar:

      The project, obviously as a mental conception, as a will to form, has a sovereignty, it has an internal power that must be imposed.

So this archive-website of Idee-Fixe, records more these ideas, processes and in many instances the collaborations that made them possible.

It´s about THE LIFE OF IDEAS.

bottom of page