Albedo: the Observation, the Finding, the Matter, the Mystery

About

The term “albedo” is the expected loss percent of light that a planet can reflect. That means, albedo is the reflection coefficient of a surface - thinking about our Earth, the reflected sunlight creating the white halo around us while watching us from the space. The name itself comes from the Latin “albus”, white, and it can be measured on a scale from zero (no reflection of a perfectly black surface) to one (perfect reflection of a white surface).
As a second meaning, “albedo” was used in alchemy to indicate a state of matter when trying to transmuting something into gold – the whitening moment that actually happens before turning a stone into gold.
Cecilia and Sofia Nercasseau Gibson, half alchemists, half astronomers, gathered merging objects in Berlin and turn them first into a unique piece of mineral-like sculpture, then into gold: the unusual rock, suspended and enlighten, becomes a planet, gently rotating on itself in the middle of the exhibition room and whose albedo can be admired. The lost, random meteorite that remains still, floating into the darkness, suddenly emerges bright in front of the viewer, as an epiphany.
The indistinct mass, originated by a melting-pot of substances assumes then multiple meanings. Simultaneously, the piece is three-dimensional and dimensionless because of its halo and reflection that dazzle the viewer. It is, as well, a small-scale meteorite since meteorites are space debris compacted together, while reminding us of the philosopher stone: the philosopher stone was the core of the alchemy research during centuries, embodying enlightenment and perfection, the mysterious element capable to turn base metal into gold.
ALBEDO is then multifaceted as its components: Cecilia and Sofia Nercasseau Gibson want us to think about the meaning of the finding and the mystery within the everyday matter. They want us to be triggered, to wander blindly into the dark, then to be blind and finally, to see.