Interview with Ricardo Morcillo by Karoline Ketelhake
Published on 9 JUL 2025.
“Soul of Radiance” gives form to absence and evokes lives often overlooked within the urban landscape. What drew you to explore themes of invisibility, memory, and displacement through light and movement?
In Soul of Radiance, I’m drawn to everything that cannot be seen or touched in the city — the echoes of the past, untold stories, and displaced bodies that have lost their place. Light, in its immaterial nature, allows me to speak about the tension between presence and disappearance. Movement, in dialogue with the soundscape, introduces a temporal dimension that evokes memory, transit, and the constant shifting of identities on the margins of urban space.
The figure in your work shifts between presence and absence, resisting fixed identity. How do you see this ambiguity inviting personal interpretation?
It’s precisely within that ambiguity that a direct invitation to the viewer emerges. There is no single figure or closed narrative. The silhouette fragments, dissolves, reassembles—like identity itself, which is never fixed or definitive. I’m interested in creating a porous, open space where each person can project themselves, recognize something familiar, or simply feel moved through their own experience. It’s a way to activate the work from an intimate place, allowing each person to undertake their own journey.
You place great importance on collective awareness and emotional connection. In what ways do these themes come through in your work Soul of Radiance?
We live in a world that moves at a vertiginous pace, where there is rarely space for pause or introspection. Soul of Radiance offers a collective experience that can only be accessed through stillness and contemplation. I aim to create atmospheres that awaken something deeply personal yet shared—an emotion that arises in silence, in attentive listening, in the embrace of light. In this piece, light and sound intertwine to form a landscape of shared awareness.
What kind of response do you envision from the audience when encountering your work in a public context and what role does audience projection play in completing the piece?
I’m not looking for a specific reaction, but rather for a state of openness and active contemplation. Soul of Radiance doesn’t impose a reading or follow a traditional narrative structure—there is no beginning, middle, or end. The viewer’s experience is built through perception, through the way they inhabit or move into the light and the soundscape. I’m interested in that intersection between the intimate and the collective, between personal experience and shared presence in public space.
How did your journey into light art begin?
I come from an architecture background, and I’ve always been fascinated by the way light transforms space and activates emotion. Over time, I moved away from function and closer to emotion, to the sensory dimension—to light art as a medium for raising questions rather than providing answers. I discovered in light a powerful yet subtle language, capable of speaking to my own concerns: global awareness, the relationship between people and their environment, the tension between the urban and the natural. From there, a journey began that continues to expand.
In addition to being an artist you promote light culture through lectures, academic teaching, and publications. How does this aspect of sharing knowledge connect to or influence your artistic practice?
For me, creating and sharing are part of the same gesture. Teaching and dissemination invite me to question myself, to put the intuitive into words, and to open new processes. I’m interested in building community, weaving networks, and fostering critical thinking around light—not just as material, but as a social, political, and emotional language. That feedback loop enriches my artistic practice and connects me with other people, ways of working, and ways of seeing.
Looking ahead, what directions or projects are you excited to explore in your artistic journey?
I’m interested in continuing to deepen projects that engage with public space, nature, and social context. I’m currently developing new pieces such as Voice of Wind and Falling Whispers, where I explore sensory narratives linked to both natural and urban landscapes—where the ethereal takes shape through light. I’m also drawn to collaborating with local communities through more open and participatory processes that expand the sense of the collective. And of course, I hope to keep bringing my work to new territories, in dialogue with festivals and platforms like Invisible Cities, which are committed to the poetic, the political, and the transformative.