1492: A New World View

In 1492: A New World View, a TV monitor sits atop jars of olive-oil soap, playing a loop of figures running, jumping, and hanging out around a monument wrapped in scaffolding. At first, the scene feels ordinary. Then glitches appear: scaffolding flickers, a body phases through steel, the structure stutters into disappearance. The figures who move through this monument are all Black—non-playable characters, or NPCs, usually coded in digital spaces as background bodies, overlooked and unimportant. Here they become central, haunting the frame with their very mundane persistence. They mow, jump, ball, iron, peruse — but never exit their loops.

The piece was created in collaboration with Guillaume Rogers of Artefactory, a Paris-based visualization studio known for their commercial renderings of architecture, monuments, and large-scale civic projects. Artefactory’s images usually serve developers, governments, and corporations by projecting futures of glass towers or restored colonial facades. In this work, their tools are redirected and inverted towards a different form of intervention.

By staging glitches in a monument modeled after Columbus, 1492: A New World View insists on the necessary instability of such monument. Monuments are not neutral—they are commercial products, constantly maintained, marketed, and sold as images of power. The piece unsettles that narrative: it lulls the viewer into the ordinary only to remind us that rupture, unease, and dissent are never far beneath the surface.