WHY THE MOON

Interactive Tableau Vivant (2016)

In collaboration with Pawel Dziadur, audio/visual artist and programmer.

Consensus reality - and historical reality within it - is a collective construction, a set of undisputed “facts” agreed upon by individuals and societies but, does this consensus contain all the dimensions of Reality? What happens when accepted narratives are permeated by suppressed data?

Why the Moon? is a metaphor of waiting and expectation as well as a questioning of our responsibility in the construction of our consensus. By problematizing a moment captured in time, Why the Moon? attempts to subvert historical narratives by reevaluating them as ideological constructs.

The installation consists of an interactive two-channels video installation and an electronic game to be played by the public, which determines the events happening in the projections.

From Cuban Art News:
Bienal Snapshot: Between, Inside, Outside

Described as an “interactive tableau vivant,” Estrada’s work took as its starting point the Raúl Corrales photograph El sueño, which Estrada described as “very significant” for his generation. The intention of the work, he said in an interview first published in La Jiribilla and then in is to “force the viewer to re-evaluate his (or her) construction of reality.”

“The conquest of the Moon became a kind of romantic metaphor for humanity, but in the end it was a sort of competition to see who went farther with a rocket and who had more power. This idea masked reality, and what I do is take this image that looks so calm and ask why the Moon,” Estrada explained.

LUCID DREAM

Toronto, 2016 (2nd Iteration)

WHY THE MOON

La Habana, 2015

Omar Estrada