National Representative of El Salvador at the Latin American Pavilion
Opening: 31 May 2013, 4:30pm
Tese dell’Isolotto dell’Arsenale
Campo della Tana
2169 – 30122 Venice
Commissioner: Sylvia Irrazábala
Curator: Alfons Hug, Paz Guevara
The installation simulates a crash landing by a shabby, third-world parody of the Soviet Space Program’s Sputnik satellite. Elaborated with found and cheap materials and objects, it is a humorous and colorful recreation based on the Vostok program’s Korabl-Sputnik 5. The capsule includes sound, which is composed of recordings made on a popular marketplace in El Salvador.
The work deals with the effects of the Cold War in El Salvador and Central America and also with the disparities between so called “first world” and “third world.”
While the so called Space Race (between the US and the USSR, which developed during the ’50s and ’60s) pushed both superpowers into a technological and military competition for world supremacy, a race was also played in smaller and suddenly significant scenarios like El Salvador, which became a sort of “proxy war.”
3rd World Sputnik is a wannabe capsule, a fusion of opposites which dreams of technological progress and modernity but is caught in its own cultural, social and economic limitations. It speaks of our all too soon forgotten past by means of a futuristic out of this world spacecraft.
This work is part of a series of ephemeral sculptures, drawings and diagrams titled “Tropical Space Proyectos.”
–text by Simón Vega