Recycled aluminum, 2024

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Maiz, the founding plant of Mesoamerican civilizations and a millennial symbol of identity and memory, is here transposed into an industrial, recycled material: aluminum. This material translation carries a critical charge. The shape of the kernel, cast in recycled aluminum, shifts between several readings: it evokes, in turn, the cannonball, the blade, the instrument of coercion, so many figures of the colonial violence inflicted upon the peoples and territories nourished by this same plant. Maize thus becomes a double object, at once a nourishing seed and a silent weapon, a symbol of resistance as much as a trace of domination. In choosing a recycled material, Oviedo Vega also situates his gesture within a contemporary decolonial reflection: transforming industrial waste into an object carrying ancient memory is a refusal of erasure, a reaffirmation of the persistence of American identity in the face of colonialism's legacies.