top of page

Donde la Tierra Permanece

Mauricio Palos | Photography

In this exhibition, Mauricio Palos presents a series of meta-narratives that interweave declassified documents, historical archives, and photographic documentation following the traces and presence of American colonialism and extractivism in Mexico, Panama, Colombia, and the United States, showing traces of the sociopolitical impact on the Latin American territory. The author makes evident the puzzle of the interventionist strategies in the framework of the Cold War, at the same time that he delves into the routes of the evangelical churches and the reconfiguration of spiritual territories throughout the continent.

The tour begins in the Balboa lunar crater, a nod to the training that the first astronauts had at the School of the Americas, founded in 1946  and located in Panama until 1984. The main mission of said institution was to serve as an instrument to confront the counterinsurgency movements that went beyond the US ideological canons. The infamous graduates: military, police, dictators and even drug traffickers applied to the letter the knowledge acquired in courses and manuals, politically destabilizing and violating human rights in Latin America, under the protection of their governments.

In his pieces, Palos experiments with video and printing techniques, constructing visual compositions that link micro-stories with historical facts, generating documented hypotheses and speculations: the similarity between the Trumpist militias and the manual "Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare", designed by the CIA and used against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua; US involvement in the Napalm bomb attack in Tolima, Colombia, in the 1950s; the photographic follow-up of the supporters of Dr. Salvador Nava and the threat that the growth of the Cabo Tuna aerospace project in Potosí, and its Physics 1 rocket, could have represented for the American people in 1957.

Images that reveal a complete network between ideology, power, spirituality and its continuity in other parts of our galaxy; cultural impositions whose consequences are a long list of traumas, injustices, dispossession and losses where only the Earth remains.

bottom of page