Good night, post-NAFTA America. Guillermo Gómez-Peña: satire and provocation
On Thanksgiving Day 1994, the evening news of over three and a half million American households was suddenly interrupted by two cyber pirates claiming to be from Aztec TV. From their underground “Vato-bunker” located “somewhere between New York, Miami and Los Angeles”, an alternative programme was aired in an act of “guerrilla television”. Behind this hijacking was performance artist and activist Guillermo Gómez-Peña, who posed as a “post-NAFTA Cyber-Aztec TV pirate” to expose the contradictions of a supposed North American identity. Through a collage of home movies, excerpts from his past performances, Mexican films, political commentary and other sundry items, Gómez-Peña analysed North–South relations (especially between the United States and Mexico), border culture and racial politics. Drawing heavily on Spanglish humour, experimental aesthetics, political activism and sharp analysis, the programme broadcast during this staged sabotage became one of the artist’s emblematic works—a rollercoaster that swatted racialised prejudices out of its way.
MACBA Thirty
We celebrate Year Thirty of an infinite MACBA that projects the future as a space for revision and possibility: of taking up what was left unfinished, updating what needs it and projecting anew everything that can still be transformed.
