LAND!LAND!, 2021

Pressed soil

300 x 320 x 300 cm

Teoría de la generación espontánea, SOMA, Mexico City

​​​

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.

​

LAND! LAND!, 2021

AR instagram filter

Produced in collaboration with LAAA, Mexico City​

​

The second part consists of an Instagram filter that uses augmented reality to show the Columbus monument toppled, allowing users to place it anywhere in the world, at any scale and from any angle. The project reflects on how certain historical symbols of power persist in collective imagination not only through their physical reproductions in the urban space but also through their preservation and recreations in the digital world.