This work was a central element in Villar Rojas' exhibition "Lo que el fuego me trajo", "What fire has brought me" at the Ruth Benzacar Gallery in Buenos Aires in 2008. This installation was the first time the artist focused almost exclusively on the use of cement-gray clay. This technique has since become his signature style thanks to his installations which grew bigger and bigger, such as at the 54th Venice Biennal where he represented Argentina, the Ungovernables exhibition at the New Museum, the monumental installation at Documenta 13, the 90 meter long installation at the Tuilleries gardens in Paris during the 2011 FIAC and in "la incocencia de los animales" at MoMA PS1 in 2013, to name a few. In 2013, villar Rojas also made a video work by the same title for the exhibition "The insides are on the outside", curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist at Lina Bo Bardi's glass house is Sao Paolo.

About the Benzacar exhibition in 2008: "A disturbing sight, Lo que el fuego me trajo faced the viewers with the destruction and the generation of universes that were as intimate as they were colossal, intertwined in a mysterious arm wrestling. “I make monuments because I am not ready to lose anything”, was, to the surprise of many, the statement of this young artist, who appeared to be stubbornly trying to store forever a combination of affections and presences that had provided him real or imaginary shelter at some point. “It is as though I had died 200 years ago.” In the manner of an archaeological finding, still to be arranged and in varying states of conservation, on a floor covered with debris and some wooden shelves, Villar Rojas gathered together several architectonic elements, winged human figures, animals, fossils of gigantic beasts, fantastic beings, car parts, everyday utensils, articles of clothing, organic forms, indiscernible objects made from clay by the artist and some assistants."

"That 2008 exhibition in Buenos Aires was somehow the base to launch a brand-new paradigm missile that would eventually impact my own head." From AVR interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Paris, June 2011.

"The clay originals have themselves disappeared to become their own rumour; like all of Villar Rojas’s clay sculptures, they were created for a specific time, to be destroyed after their exhibition. Clay is a privileged material for Villar Rojas; as he revealed to me in 2011: ‘… clay enabled me to build fossils: I could fossilize whatever I wanted, and thus I could work with time. I could fictionalize the passing of time by representing its effects on matter.’ The discovery of clay was an epiphany for the artist; as he says, ‘I could build my own ruins’. But clay has a deeper significance beyond this, as an elemental life force: ‘I dare to say that clay itself has pretty much been the ideological, narrative and aesthetic engine that engendered the universe.’ "
(Text by Hans Ulrich Obrist, from ‘Adrián Villar Rojas: The Work of The Ocean’, exhibition at Foundation de 11 Lijnen, Oudenburg, April 20 - July 13, 2013)