Tropical Departures

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Artist Simón Vega comes from El Salvador and exhibited at the last Venice Biennale in the Latin-American pavilion. There he showed his work 'Third World Sputnik', a spherical capsule of waste products, which he collected from the streets and beaches of El Salvador, as a relic of our throwaway society. Characteristic for many works by Vega is his reliance on materials found locally that tell us something about local life. His works are always also political commentaries. As a traveler between his home country of Latin America, the United States, and Europe, Vega says he prefers the terms First and Third World, because they define and illustrate the huge gap between the two and show that these worlds are as irreconcilable and alien as different planets. Vega himself feels like a traveler, who commutes between different worlds; this is also evident in the works documented in the publication, the sputniks, spacecrafts and other alien elements from the last 20 years such as 'Tropical Space Proyectos' or 'Lost Cities Panopticam Project'.