América Espectropical Cycle
La Tallera
In 1932, David Alfaro Siqueiros painted in Los Angeles, California, Tropical America oppressed and destroyed by imperialism. Due to its strong political content, the work was whitewashed a few months after it was finished. In this mural, Siqueiros symbolically represented the devastating consequences of ─American and European─ imperialism in Latin America, enough of a reason for its financial backers to destroy it shortly after its completion. Despite this, today we can say that, after its restoration in 2012, the mural has persisted over time in the collective memory as though a ghost.
The La Tallera programmatic two-year cycle América Espectropical is anchored in Siqueiros’ political imaginary and to stimulate reflections of the impact of the destruction and/or the erasure of art works or of images and documents (erasure similar to the burning of tropical forests and other cataclysms) on the collective imaginaries.
The two-year initiative brings together a series of proposals that reflect on the exploitation of people and the environment, with themes that point to human rights debates or those of nature and climate change. The imaginary “survivors” of the erasure of Siqueiros’ mural are today specters of an America in which racial violence and the devastation of our environment point to the oppression and cruelty of social and economic models that threaten all life. With the same critical spirit of the muralist, the América Espectropical Cycle seeks to address the environmental crisis, gender violence, migration and the rights of nature. Based on images that act as spectrums, the two-year exhibition proposal elicits critical imagery, those that value the environment and all living beings.
