Fulgotopo
1. m. A crystalised place created when a high voltage lightning bolt enters the ground.
This rock is a crystallisation produced by conducting a high voltage current through stone dust of the Cybele Palace. It is an artificial fulgurite from the great telegraph building project; an electric rock waiting to be licked.
This rock was created to be licked, so that the owner of this publication can incorporate the place – the fulgutopo – into their metabolism, in an action decontextualised in time and space. Using the vortex where the tongue is sensitive to electricity in order to erode the crystallisation of that place with saliva and skin, incorporating it to your body.
The Cybele Palace was the great axiom of the start of the XX century. It allowed our voice to become electricity in order to reach another person. This building marks the beginning of a country becoming electricity to communicate. From this moment onwards, the body could be imagined as electricity to travel to another place.
The network of electric telegraphs already had ten thousand kilometres of overhead copper wire and almost two hundred stations, communicating Madrid with all the province capitals in a radial structure. From the central tower, hundreds of copper cables radiated outwards.
The number of copper wire in the telegraph systems was halved when the specialists realised that the ground could be used as a conductor.
When a lightning touches the ground, it solidifies it. This high voltage finds the potential difference to discharge, producing enough energy to crystallise the place it hits. These crystallisations are known as fulgurites.
In 1746, the French scientist and priest Jean Antoine Nollet gathered approximately 200 monks in a radius of about 1 mile, connecting them together with steel wire. Nollet then discharged a bottle battery from Leyden through the human chain and observed that each of them reacted almost simultaneously to the electrical discharge, demonstrating in this way the high speed of electricity.
The electricity conducted through the stone dust of the Cybele Palace is now a rock that must be ingested. With the ingestion of exogenous bodies, we absorb their information, transcribing and transforming the objects and our own materiality. In a reciprocal exchange, we become them, and they become us.
Ten kilos
of Novelda Rock
and
forty thousand volts
Fulgutopo occurred inside the publication Lifting Belly in November 2020, curated by Marta Cacciavillani, Lxo Cohen y Laura Plant, and produced by Sandretto foundation.
The project was developed in collaboration with Leo Picazarri, Marc Boada and José Vicente Casado.