The U.S. (a spaceship)

From the exhibition ‘’Who tells a tale adds a tail’’ currently on view at the Denver Art Museum

The sculpture is inspired by a series of paintings that the bolivian artist Alfredo da Silva did in the 60s while he earned the Guggenheim scholarship in the United States. In these depictions da Silva aimed to portray what at the moment would be the arrival to the man on the Moon close to 1969.

Another key figure that constitutes the DNA of this display is the “avión de la plaza Avaroa”, an airplane sculpture that was given to the the neighborhood where I was born, Sopocachi, by the Rotary Club in 1952, which curiously coincides with our National Revolution, a moment where propaganda was indeed distributed through airplanes around the city. Is not a minor fact that this revolt counted with the support from the U.S. government.

Therefore these 2 depictions of spaceships/airplanes is for me how I’ve experienced the United States as a concept, for me the the United States of America, as a middle class child in the 90s, is a spaceship that arrives full of content, which in a way can make an echo with colonization processes. If we stop for a bit and think of strategies the catholic church managed in order to evangelize people, filing up the imagination of different populations through media is the best way to control desire.

Like the catholic church and painting as media for fascist catholic/spanish propaganda.