Long-term project

Lucky Break

A found room filled with lottery tickets, preserved, reconstructed and reactivated every year with a new number.

Period2022–ongoing

ContextCollegium, Arévalo · Doblad, mis amores

PlaceArévalo

Curated byChus Martínez

Assistant curatorAldones Nino

Design and installationOriol Pinell

PhotographyLucía Berrón (process) · Roberto Ruiz (installation)

CollectionCollegium Collection

MediumReconstructed room, lottery tickets, steel structure, methacrylate, algorithm and archive

While visiting the site where Collegium was being developed, I entered one of the abandoned houses that was due to be demolished. Inside I found a small elongated room whose walls were completely covered with lottery tickets.

For more than thirty years, someone had been collecting and attaching them there: Christmas lottery tickets, El Niño, repetitions, isolated numbers and images that changed over time. With my background in mathematics, the accumulation immediately opened up the possibility of looking for relations, combinations and patterns.

The work does not only preserve a room: it preserves a decision repeated for decades and keeps that decision moving forward.

Project chapters

1. The discovery · Arévalo

The first part of the project is simply finding and looking. The room contained close to a thousand tickets accumulated over more than thirty years. They were not arranged chronologically, and their distribution turned the walls into a disordered, personal time series that could not be reconstructed from outside.

Detail of the original wall covered with lottery tickets

Detail of a ticket showing an image of Arévalo

Photographs: Lucía Berrón

2. Dismantling to preserve

Before the house was demolished, the tickets were removed one by one while preserving their position and relation to the original room. The dismantling was not simply technical: it was the means of retaining a structure that would otherwise disappear with the building.

Photographs: Lucía Berrón

3. Reconstructing the room

For the exhibition, a full-scale replica of the room was built, preserving the openings of the door, window and cupboard. The tickets were installed again in the same arrangement. Methacrylate makes both front and back visible, turning the reconstruction into a transparent architecture of accumulated documents.

4. Collegium · Arévalo

The reconstruction was presented at Collegium in the exhibition Doblad, mis amores, curated by Chus Martínez, with Aldones Nino as assistant curator. The installation also acts as a remnant of the domestic interiors that disappeared during the transformation of the site. The work was acquired and is part of the Collegium Collection.

Installation photographs: Roberto Ruiz

5. One new number every year · ongoing

The collection remains active. Each year I work with the time series formed by the previous numbers and use that series to generate a mathematical prediction for the number that should be bought next. The new lottery ticket is incorporated into the work. The system therefore grows once a year, keeping Lucky Break from ever reaching a definitively closed form.