Santiago Sierra's Proyecto Juárez Censored in Mexico

Clancco  ||   2 April 2007

Proyecto Juárez and ArtNet News reported on March 30, 2007 that "a new project by the always controversial Spanish artist Santiago Sierra has been censored before it began. As part of an ambitious "Proyecto Juárez" in Ciudad Juarez, the sprawling border community between Mexico, New Mexico and Texas -- home to a thriving sweatshop industry -- Sierra proposed making a work titled Palabra de Fuego ("Word of Fire"), which would consist of the word "sumisión" ("submission") carved in 15-meter letters into a field at the western end of the city, only a few meters from the U.S. border. The location is symbolically potent, both as a proposed site for a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico, and as an area with high levels of environmental toxicity due to lead smelting by U.S. companies.

Sierra's earthwork was somehow to be lit on fire on Mar. 24, 2007, and webcast live on www.santiago-sierra.com. The performance was cancelled, however, after local authorities claimed that fumes from the work would be hazardous to the environment. The claim was disputed by the project's sponsors, who said it would produce pollution equivalent to the emissions of two buses on a 20-kilometer ride. Sierra's work was the first in a series of 17 public art works sponsored by El Palacio Negro, a local nonprofit organization headed by Mariana David, with help from the Spanish Embassy and other groups (other artists involved in the project include Miguel Calderón, Yoshua Okón, Javier Tellez and Artur Zmijewski).

Sierra's most recent provocations include setting up a kind of "homemade gas chamber" in a Cologne synagogue in 2006 as a protest against "the banalization of the Holocaust" and, more recently, buying Regina Galindo's Golden Lion from the 2005 Venice Biennale "in order to resell it for a higher price," a project that opened at the Prometeogallery di Ida Pisani in Milan in January 2007."

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