LAND!LAND!, 2021

Pressed soil

300 x 320 x 300 cm

Teoría de la generación espontánea, SOMA, Mexico City

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LAND! LAND! is a two-part project that unfolds across both digital and material space. It fantasizes about destabilizing colonial symbols embedded in the urban landscape and collective memory. The first part is a 1:1 replica of the base of the Columbus Monument at Columbus Circle in New York, recreated using pressed soil from Puebla, Mexico—a fragile sandcastle that contradicts the monument’s intended permanence. Some reliefs and inscriptions were altered or omitted to distort its symbolic charge: for example, the scene of Columbus’s arrival has been mirrored, and the plaque’s inscription edited to read, “never uttered a more thrilling call than that which resounded from the ocean. America, LAND! LAND!”—an affirmation that reclaims the land as our own.