While visiting the site where Collegium would later develop its museum, I entered one of the abandoned houses awaiting demolition. Inside, I found a small elongated room whose walls were entirely covered with lottery tickets. Over more than thirty years, someone had collected and pinned them there: Christmas lottery, El Niño, repeated tickets, isolated numbers, a whole private logic that I could not decipher.
As someone trained in mathematics, I became fascinated by the hidden order behind that accumulation. Rather than extracting the tickets as mere documents, I decided to preserve the room itself. For the exhibition, all the tickets were carefully removed and reinstalled in the same arrangement inside a full-scale reconstruction of the space, keeping the openings of the door, the window and the cupboard. The structure was built so that both sides of the tickets could remain visible.
The work does not only preserve a past gesture. It also reactivates it. Each year a new lottery ticket is bought with a number predicted by a mathematical algorithm built from the previous tickets, so the collection continues to grow through a new contribution every year.
The title refers both to the long search for luck contained in those tickets and to the luck I had in finding that room.
The piece now forms part of the Collegium Collection.
