Yunnan, the colorful and the mundane: a pot of boiling water
for tea, light through curtains, men and women building a
home, prayer ?ags in the wind, a boy playing with a stick.
• • • • • • •
In the Atlantic Forest Southeast Reserves of Brazil,
Rigo 23 worked closely with indigenous Guaraní leaders and
craftspeople, the residents of Quilombo Ivaporunduva (an
Afro-Brazilian community established by escaped slaves in
the seventeenth century), and a single Caiçara family that has
lived inside the park for generations. This collaboration
resulted in a thirty-foot-long sculpture of a Trident nuclear
submarine, an accompanying cluster bomb, and hundreds of
small, woven bomblets—made almost entirely from Atlantic
forest materials like earth, bamboo, banana >ber, and feathers and modeled on those built by Lockheed Martin. In the
place of lethal explosives, anteaters, owls, jaguars, and other
forest animals hand-carved by the Guaraní tumble out of the
cluster bomb and spill onto the ?oor of the gallery.
Hanging inside the Museum of Contemporary Art San
Diego, Rigo’s sculptures are only a few miles away from
actual nuclear submarines stationed by the U.S. Navy in the
city port.
“I would consider my work successful,” said Rigo, “if the
citizens of San Diego would say that it is no longer bearable
for them to coexist with so many machines of death around
them, that they would >nd it impossible to be at the beach
having fun while an aircraft carrier sat nearby, >lled to the
brim with thousands of young people in uniform preparing
for endless war. I do realize these are high expectations.” a
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