In Levedad Insoportable (Unbearable Lightness), Miler Lagos constructs an image that seems immediately familiar: a cluster of metallic, heart-shaped balloons anchored to the ground. At first glance, everything suggests lightness and celebration. But astonishment comes when one realizes that these balloons, far from floating, barely sway under their own weight: they are made of concrete and steel, each weighing between 6 and 9 kilograms.
The installation plays with the ambiguity between appearance and material. Lagos compels the viewer to abandon the literal reading of the image and confront a sensory experience that exposes the contradiction between what we see and what it is. The act of “simulating” transforms the object’s immediate reading into a critical reflection on how we construct meaning: the balloon—an icon of everyday affection—becomes here a dense, unsettling, and dangerous artifact.
The work dismantles our perceptual certainties and confronts us with the limits of illusion. As curator Paula Silva has noted, Levedad Insoportable challenges our trust in the image and forces the viewer to reconsider the cultural codes that shape their interpretation of the world. In that disjunction between what is seen and what is weighed, the work strains the relationship between culture, matter, and belief.
