Yoshua Okon documents (or more accurately, orchestrates) re-enactment in a much more ambiguous and interesting way than most other artists dealing with re-enactments. A lot to think about here.
Octopus, is a 4 channel video installation. Inserted within the US tradition of civil war re-enactments, Octopus re-enacts the Guatemalan civil war. Except, civil war re-enactments traditionally take place in the actual fields where historical battles happened and are performed by people who did not actually fight in the war. Instead, for this occasion the site responds to a symbolic nature: the battlefield is relocated to US soil at a Home Depot parking lot in Los Angeles. And it is performed by the actual combatants who, during the 1990s fought in the war that is being re-enacted: a dozen members of the Los Angeles Mayan community, all recent undocumented immigrants who gather to look for work as day laborers at the same parking lot where the shoot takes place.
The piece focuses on Ciudad Juárez as a maquiladora site and on its role within the global context. It is a detailed construction of Bergson, a fictitious factory that produces canned laughter for sitcoms. For it, dozens of ex-maquiladora workers were hired both as part of the research process and as actors. Canned Laughter alludes to mechanized processes and to slavery in the age of globalization as well as to the impossibility to translate and reproduce true emotions though technological means.
In 2014, Oracle, Arizona, was the arena for the largest-yet protest against the entrance of unaccompanied children from Central America into the U.S. During Okón’s first trip to Oracle he spoke to the leaders who orchestrated the protest. They agreed to gather those that participated in the protest, in order for Okón to create a live reenactment based on what happened from their ideological perspective as well as to create extra scenes. Oracle also includes a video of a chorus where 9 of the immigrant children sing a modified version of the US Marin’s [sic] Hymn. The original hymn glorifies US invasions around the world. For the new version, the children narrate the US invasion to Guatemala placing special emphasis in the complicity of the government with transnational corporations.
He even dares to tackle Mexican neo-Nazis in Bocanegra. I don’t know what to say as an analysis of that work, except that perhaps it’s enough of an alarm bell to show that groups of people still think that way.