Fernando Bryce

The project was a commission from inSITE/Casa Gallina to artist Fernando Bryce. It is based on research of the Allende meteorite that fell in the Mexican state of Chihuahua in 1969 (the same year that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon). Having discovered a small fragment of the Allende in the collection of the Geology Museum, Bryce was fascinated by the story of the meteorite, one of the largest to fall to earth, that was almost immediately broken up and sold to geology museums and collectors around the world. This meteorite is considered part of the material that shaped the Universe and therefore it contains the most ancient information about the birth of the solar system. For Bryce, the material and symbolic value of the Allende meteorite is the solidified memory that relates to the origin of an abstract cosmos, a presence of the cosmic world compared to the human footprint on the sediment of the moon.

The work takes form through an arrangement of fifteen screen prints made by the artist in Santa María, together with twenty meteorites—part of the museum’s collection—that fell at different geographical points around the earth. As a rocky landscape the piece suggests a metropolis of meteorites. The rocks, in full visual dialogue with the accumulation of images proposed by the artist, reveal, from the perspective of a city formed by celestial vestiges, the oscillation of space matter in relation to the United States’ concern for progress and conquest. The screen-prints are an appropriation of images from newspapers about the meteorite’s impact and others about the Apollo XI lunar landing, in which Bryce recuperates articles from the era, superimposing expanded backgrounds of the Allende Meteorite’s rocky texture onto some of them. The transposition of this information comes from one of the artist’s core interests in fracturing the conditions about the truth behind human evolution, toward shaping new forms of representation of historical memory. The images about the United States’ space mission to the moon do nothing but accentuate the media coverage of that moment aimed at focusing attention on the US’s global power. This exhibition seeks to encourage the creative thinking of students and neighbors through a fictional anchor to the events referenced in the project.

Curator: Violeta Celis

Final Project: The installation of fifteen silkscreen prints together with geological specimens at the Geology Museum located in the center of Santa María la Ribera.

Acknowledgments