The giant face of Obama is a trademark of hope, freedom and equality and simultaneously their fragility. The Expectation project megalomanised this image of hope through which people’s trust was marketed, but also cut through it. The weight of the project is large – more than 650 tons of sand and gravel distributed on the shore of Barcelona. The heavy weight of material used is a metaphor for the pre-election campaign which promised hope to the US and consequently to the whole world. Sand paintings were traditionally used by Native American culture in healing rituals where art was a part of life and not separate from it. By using this technique, the symbolic, the natural and the political merge. Even though it is created as a cry for change, the sand mandala eludes the dispersal of hope with a simple wind blow. The image of American influence and hope that American politics will finally change dispersed on the ground of a European port was only seen from air.
Jorge Rodriguez Gerada was born in Santa Clara, Cuba in 1966, but immigrated to the US with his family in 1970. He was a founding member of the group Artfux. After its rupture, Rodriguez-Gerada continued working with the Artfux splinter group Cicada Corps, where he in New York altered countless billboards, was part of numerous exhibitions and undertook guerrilla performances. In 2002 he started working on collective memory with the project Identity Series: Gigantic charcoal portraits of anonymous people scale the walls of buildings in different cities around the world.
More on Jorge Rodriguez Gerada webpage
