To visit silence after the blast, 2023 - 2024
Wood, barbed wire, paint.
In 1988, the movie "Fatman and Little Boy" was filmed between the states of Durango and Coahuila. This film dramatically recreates the development process of the Manhattan Project, which resulted in the creation of the bombs used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II. Near the capital of the state of Durango, the military installation of Los Alamos was recreated, originally located in New Mexico, while in my region, La Comarca Lagunera, certain facilities of the White Sands test site, also in New Mexico, were recreated. I visited the abandoned filming sets between Durango and Coahuila to carry out site-specific interventions and to shoot a video that presents the fiction of a town in northern Mexico that suffered an experimental nuclear attack by the United States, about which no one speaks for fear of reprisals. In this sense, I connect, through fiction, two historical events: the filming of that movie and the fall of a U.S. test missile that was supposed to impact in White Sands, New Mexico, but accidentally fell in the Zone of Silence –also in La Comarca Lagunera, very close to one of the filming locations– in 1971. For this, a mission was implemented to recover the missile remnants in Mexico with discretion and permission from the Mexican government, called Operation Sand Patch. This video shows landscape as a witness of the representation that Hollywood makes of the regions that suffer the violence they tend to recreate, taking the silence that was mandatory during the development of the Project Manhattan as a side character of the story.
In 1988, when they finished the shooting of Fatman and Little Boy in Durango, the locations they used and the buildings they made where left behind. People from around those places took advantage of this situation and scavanged whatever they could from the settings, only to leave the ruins of what once was a recreation of the Los Alamos test site originally located in New Mexico. I did the same 30 years later to make signs that show, in spanish, parts of the mantra they repeated every time to keep the secrecy of the project: WHAT YOU SEE HERE, WHAT YOU DO HERE, WHAT YOU HEAR HERE, WHEN YOU LEAVE HERE, LET IT STAY HERE.
Intervened digitalized 35 and 120 mm photography, intervented declassified CIA documents.
This is the evidence of fiction. These are dyptics displayed as forensic evidence, showing photographies I took when I visited the abandoned settings of the movie, internet pictures from that same place and declassified U.S. government documents from the Project Manhattan mixed with the original script of Fatman and Little Boy.