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IÑIGO MANGLANO-OVALLE:
If art for me is a platform from which to speak,

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but not tell you something?

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That’s good.

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And if that’s a way in which I give you a 
platform from which to think and debate it,

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that’s even better, because ultimately 
art for me does not reside in the object,

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it resides in what’s said about the object.

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All my work, even the most formal work, has...

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an underlying politics to it.

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But I don’t want to reveal my position.

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In LE BAISER or “the Kiss”

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I’m washing windows in Mies van der Rohe’s 
Fansworth House out in Plano, Illinois.

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The camera outside is always mic-ed to 
the sound of the squeegee on the glass.

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And it’s very sort of ambient in 
one way and then very physical.

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The squeegee squeaks and 
sarcastically kisses the building.

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(MUSIC)

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Whenever the camera is inside the 
pane of glass or inside the building,

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there’s an ethereal sort of electronic music

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which is a single moment of a 
guitar solo by the band KISS,

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and then that little guitar, nanosecond,

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is stretched to make the sound piece or 
the score for all the interior shots.

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I have a strong connection 
to architecture in my work.

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At a very young age I was taken by 
my parents to see Mies’ architecture.

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For me, on one level, the piece was just 
about visiting a shrine of modernity.

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It was about trying to figure out a 
way to actually touch the building.

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You’re three things as the actor.

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You’re artist, you’re 
laborer, and you’re architect.

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You’re artist because you’re making the film

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and because sometimes when 
you’re washing the windows

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the camera is watching your hand make a gesture.

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Almost a painting gesture across the pane.

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You’re also just simply washing a window.

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So it’s mundane.

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And, then you’re outside the 
building tending to its form.

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So you’re the architect.

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And inside is a young woman 
spinning some discs on a platform

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with headphones being separated by the…

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a thin skin of transparency.

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But ultimately total separation.

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The female actor at one moment in the piece

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actually raises her eyes and 
looks straight into the camera,

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thereby looks into the viewer of the 
installation and acknowledges them or says,

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I see you and that’s the one moment for me that

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she’s able to penetrate through the architecture.

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Of course LE BAISER is about love,

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but it’s a kind of restrained love.

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I thought what we would do 
is run through the edit.

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The School of Architecture 
in Chicago auctioned off

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breaking the windows at the 
Mies van der Rohe’s Crown Hall.

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They were going to renovate, put new glass in.

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As it turns out, the winner of the auction 
is Mies’s grandson who is also an architect.

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I was interested in this whole 
notion of almost like patricide,

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you know the son breaking the father’s temple.

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The show in New York is a show that I think is

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kind of difficult to negotiate

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because there is no apparent sort of common theme.

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I’ve been wanting to make 
this umbrella for a long time.

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When you actually look at an umbrella, 
there’s so many complex curves in that fabric.

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There are so many parabolic equations.

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It’s very much like a flower.

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That’s probably one of the best 
designs out there in the world.

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I enlisted the help of a fabricator that 
does prototypes for stealth bombers.

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It’s called BULLETPROOF UMBRELLA.

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And it’s exactly that.

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It’s made out of graphite and 
Kevlar and space age materials.

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So I think it actually responds in 
many ways to the climate of our times.

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Although it does it very quietly.

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My mother would freak out.

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She’s from Bogotá and…

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and an open umbrella indoors is like 
bad luck for the rest of your life.

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The jack, very much like the 
umbrella takes an every day object

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and sort of scales it up 
and deforms one axis of it.

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What you end up having is this,

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it’s almost like missile that points up 
and almost touches the ceiling itself.

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There are many connections between 
these things and I think it’s just,

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for me important not to make it readily apparent.

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This sort of troublesome 
condition is what I’m looking for.

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On a very, sort of, formal sense, 
the exhibition is all about color.

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So the red film on the window 
of the gallery is a work itself.

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It’s called FROM RED TO ORANGE AND ORANGE TO RED.

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Going from high alert to not so high alert.

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I’ve been very interested in weather patterns that 
occur both inside and outside of architecture.

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In the case of RANDOM SKY in Chicago,

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the weather station is outside 
and takes the temperature,

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barometric pressure, wind speed, wind direction.

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All these streams of data connect 
directly to a set of computers

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that are running a program that generates 
these blue and white scan lines.

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When I decided to do this 
project I met Mark Hereld,

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an astrophysicist at Argon National Labs.

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MARK HERELD: I was asked originally 
to help the Hyde Park Arts Center

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figure out how to build this façade.

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We have a large effort in what’s 
called scientific visualization,

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we think about ways to sort of 
tame these herds of computers

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that are intended present environments

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that are large enough that 
people can step into them,

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become directly involved with 
what’s being put out on the screen.

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The outside world is coupling 
to this internal universe.

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So there is a kind of little 
bit of a living ecology there.

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MANGLANO-OVALLE: We got to a certain 
point where I needed to consider sound,

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and in this case I worked with a young artist

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by the name of Rick Gribenas

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who is an artist as well as a composer.

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RICK GRIBENAS: RANDOM SKY is really 
just an examination of this building

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and its architecture and the 
space that is contained within it

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and the space that kind of surrounds it.

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It’s definitely an exploration.

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It’s a, you know, the kind of great lengths that

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we as humans go through to kind 
of understand our environment

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and kind of adjust our environment.

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MANGLANO-OVALLE: RANDOM SKY 
addresses that idea of the arbitrary

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or the randomness or the uncontrollable,

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the impossibility of our desire for stability.

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CLOUD PROTOTYPE #1 was a thunderstorm

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that was captured by the department of 
atmospheric sciences at University of Illinois.

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I watched the three-dimensional 
data development as a storm

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and at a certain moment I said, “Right there.

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That’s the moment I want.”

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It’s about stopping time.

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It was just before the storm erupts.

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Capturing ephemera is an impossibility.

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And in the end you really 
haven’t captured ephemera,

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you’ve made a sculpture.

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The space between things is just as important

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or more important than the 
space that things occupy.

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Once you enter the exhibition,

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this little infrared video 
of my son at five months old

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is neglected by you because 
as soon as you walk in,

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you see the iceberg in the cloud.

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Another sculpture is so 
miniscule you can step on it.

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Red Fist and it’s in a central location,

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it’s dismissed by the viewer.

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Red Fist actually came about playing 
with my son a year-old with Play dough,

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it’s all about just grabbing 
things and holding them.

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So I would roll little balls

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and he would grab them

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and we squished them

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and his hand would open up

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and I would see this glorious, like,

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shape that’s made by his fist.

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SEARCH was a piece where the 
architecture of the site,

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this bullfight ring down in 
Tijuana sort of called it forth.

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I mean the bullfight ring already looked 
like a speaker facing up into the sky.

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The bullfight ring was 
converted into a radio telescope

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that would search for the real aliens only 
fifty meters south of the U.S. border.

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And for me it was a joke.

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I wanted to do a piece about alienation

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and about UFOs and about the alien

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and about immigration.

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When I first came to United States as a baby,

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you know I came in as a resident alien.

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And SEARCH was titled SEARCH (EN BÚSQUEDA),

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the subtitle was Searching for the Real Aliens.

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In Tijuana everybody from cab drivers 
to artists to politicians got the joke.

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I grew up with parents that were always

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having to shift the family from 
Madrid to Bogotá to the United States,

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so the world was very small at a very young age

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and I almost had to learn that there were borders.

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The General Service Administration asked me

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to propose a work for the Immigration 
Naturalization Service Building.

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Now it’s part of Homeland Security.

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I actually like the idea,

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because a whole host of 
people that I know have been

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through that building as what they call clients.

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So LA TORMENTA, these two clouds, or THE STORM,

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there’s a kind of critique that’s going on there

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because it’s a storm system that arrives

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and historically all waves of 
immigration to the U.S. have been storms.

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And have gone through 
turbulence, upon their arrival,

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and have caused turbulence

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and all of those waves come 
with a great deal of hope,

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and a great deal of anxiety.

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And that’s what a thunderstorm is.

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It’s one of the most destructive 
and most productive events.

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It was about the duality of that,

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and duality of hope and anxiety

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and the fact that the piece in a 
sense reflects its public in a way,

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you know that they are the storm.

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La Tormenta somos nosotros.