Book pages from: Juan Valverde, Historia de la composición del cuerpo humano; Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica, 1543; Georgius Agricola, De re metallica, 1556; Athanasius Kircher, Mundus Subterraneus, 1665; D.W. Thompson, The Growth of Bone: Observations of Osteogenesis, 1917
Charcoal and graphite on paper drawings
Fragments of copper-bearing rocks (property of the School of Earth Sciences Engineering, ESPOL)
The last desire appears as a scenario of biological, geological, and technical inscription, at a threshold where bodies and minerals are reconfigured as interchangeable matter. Through a process of metallic ion transfer, the copper contained in a mineral rock migrates toward a spine of titanic scale. In the human organism, copper functions as an essential element in bone formation (osteogenesis) and, in medicine, is used for stimulating tissue regeneration. This mineral capacity to coat and regenerate bodies unfolds here as if the rock were feeding the organic form, provoking an overflowing mutation that merges the living and the inert into a single agency.
This procedure—common in the metallurgical industry as a protective coating—shifts toward an alchemical gesture oscillating between technique and speculative fiction, becoming a performative act that links scientific fables and plausible experiments, where matter exceeds its frameworks and never fully settles on the technical or the symbolic plane.
Copper condenses both the weight of the territory and the global value chains, activating tensions around growth and ecological devastation. In Ecuador, the deposits of the Andean and Amazonian regions place it at the center of the country’s mining agenda: extracted mainly to meet technological industry demand, exported primarily to China as its main destination and refining node, and later reinscribed into biotechnological circuits.
In this intersection of mobility and transformation—where territory and organism inscribe one another—The last desire takes its name from the legend of The Ten Brothers, from the Ming tradition in China. This tale of cosmic and natural forces was rewritten over time, beyond its borders, until it became fables in the West. In one version, the brothers manage to escape a death sentence by resorting to superhuman abilities— among them, the power to stretch across the sea—trading their “last wish” in order to survive.
Matter emerges as an open system, migrating between rock, organism, and myth, and persists as a vestige that returns in other forms. It unfolds as a montage of temporalities, where the ancestral and the contemporary intertwine and confront one another.