Land Escape is an immersive installation consisting of video projections of larger than life characters on clear white chiffon fabric, surrounded by a fence of barbed wire and collaged deep sounds. The characters march masked, in an endless procession. Absurdly, these characters trudge across animation drawings of different landscapes (grassland, ocean, fields, and mountains) that change in the background to signify the trip and the cyclical nature of human migration.
The identity of the characters remains temporally and culturally ambiguous—some seem without gender or without age. Papier-mâché masks, primarily from artisans in my native Ecuador, and unspecific costumes transform them into archetypal representatives of any diasporic population. Their bodies reveal their exhaustion, but each one drives onward relentlessly.
This installation aims to be physically engulfing to place the viewer as part of this unending trip. Sound is an especially important part to this effect. A heart beating like mix of sounds helps the viewers synchronize themselves with the urgency of this march towards safety.
I ask the viewer to empathize with these characters, and to “put on their shoes” by stepping into the installation, but not without doing the same. I play most of the characters, a few are played by a friend. With this gesture I reveal and relive my own experience as an immigrant, not as hard as theirs, but enough to know that displacement is not a choice anyone takes voluntarily.