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Untitled (S.I.N.) 

2007

 

 

 

Three engraved gold spheres, a table with medical documentation and video

Variable dimensions

 

 

 

Three volunteers residents of Culiacán, Sinaloa were asked to swallow gold spheres with the letters S.I.N. engraved on the surface. The piece is composed of the video showing the moment when these people swallow the spheres; the medical analyses (x-rays, examinations, etc.) tracking the spheres’ journey through each body; and the spheres themselves, which were ultimately smoothed by the volunteers’ digestive systems, causing the engraved letters to disappear. 

 

How to Rebuild the World

Élmer Mendoza

May you, your across the street neighbor, the random victim, and the girl who’s just been kissed for the first time, may you come to better understand the society we’re part of, the one that accepts us with conditions and can even finish us off if it so pleases, Fritzia says, and her eyes are lemon sorbet. I explained to three volunteers that they’d have to swallow the gold spheres, the metal that traditionally represents wealth and power, twenty four carats, Fritzia states, and her hands are planes testing dangerous gambols. We recorded the act of swallowing on video, and then I took them to a doctor who did the ultrasound to make sure the spheres were securely in the volunteers’ stomachs; I was worried that something might happen to them, that their bodies would reject food that wasn’t food at all, Fritzia reveals, and her hair is a meadow under hot rain. Two days later they returned the spheres to me and they were corroded; the acids intervened, of course. In this intimate performance, we discovered that gold, the hero who underwent such an extreme, important experience, was actually affected by it. Which is how, to various extents, we are affected by the perpetrators of crimes. These people scorn life and don’t think before murdering or overpowering those who don’t belong to them, Fritzia signals, and her aura tenses and resembles Zeus’s when he got angry with Prometheus for giving men fire. I want to be sincere, one hundred-percent understandable; I’d feel stupid if people who go see the piece thought I was tricking them with a flashy set up that doesn’t represent any context at all is this clear?, Fritzia asserts, and her feet go cold because she’s cross- ing a dream in which was Wonder Woman herself. I’ll never manage to produce a single piece if people see it through aesthetic or symbolic filters. This piece is a document on how a rotten society can ultimately contaminate those who comprise it and those who arrive and try to improve it, Fritzia expresses, and her skin folds like a piece of canvas in her hands that doesn’t get much light. S.I.N. isn’t a common name; it indicates a state in life, a damaged everydayness, a painful situation, and a region: Sinaloa, in northeastern Mexico. And sin, of course; it’s another sin, a sin with which you don’t only affect yourself, but also a group that lets itself be swept away by evil and does nothing to recover the right way to live, Fritzia reflects, and her smile is a hundred birds and two more, flying into the sunset. For this deviation to be corrected, we need heroes, and maybe we should sacrifice them: that’s the fate of heroes; by the way the word “sacrifice” is inspired by their unprecedented achievements, Fritzia assures, wearing a blouse she pulled down from a cherry tree in the Las Riberas park, in Culiacán. 

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