Salvadoran artist Victor Cartagena’s latest installation, Invisible Nation, fills the walls of Galeria de la Raza with swarms of official Latin American ID photos, many of them passport pictures from the 70s and 80s, thousands of nameless faces that impress with sheer numbers, but also make it seem necessary to look more closely at each of these singular individuals and imagine their story.
For Cartagena, these masses are the reality of immigration so often forgotten in political discussion. Faced with this tidal movement of lives across borders, he insists that identities must be made out within the crowd.
Images are multiplied throughout the gallery. Video loops of faces play on the walls. Armies of photos are tacked with sewing pins to one broad expanse. Boxes covered in brown butcher paper sit in various corners of the gallery looking like so many drug bundles. The front of each package carries someone’s photo, as if all of these lives are parcels to be trafficked.
Cartagena turns tea bags into gauzy envelopes, wrapping each photo in a cottony haze. He then gathers these packets into bunches of 10 or 20 and hangs them from the gallery ceiling. The immediate impression is one of weight, a forest of ponderous hanging cords. A barely audible whisper emanates from somewhere overhead. I don’t speak Spanish, but the few words I can make out are “tristeza más tristeza.” Sadness more sadness.
