Chico Mendes, Los Anti-Heroes Y La Ley De Gravedad, Mexico City 1991

Installation with one ton of volcanic stone from Mexico City, glass, mirror, paint, photographs, and text

"Chico Mendes, from Xapuri in Acre in the northwest of Brazil, was the president of the Rubber Tappers Union. Mendes united the landless rubber tappers who use renewable resources and who do not destroy the forest against the cattle owners who consumed the forest at high velocity. Mendes was assassinated by powerful ranchers in 1988.
Soon after Chico Mendes was made into a hero by the state structure which means that the state removed the history of Mendes from a very specific political situation and anesthetized him within its state - ness.
Mendes was someone who did the things that must be done in a situation that each one of us potentially is capable of responding to. However, the state made him into kind of a super human therefore removing the potential to act from us - as ordinary people - as Mendes was. This installation was an attempt to return a person to people…to us.
The lines of the trajectory of the bullet traced on the pieces of glass line up to the person standing in front of the mirror ---the returning of Mendes to us."