Immersive video installation coming to USF gallery

There’s something beautifully unsettling about MARE MAGNVM, artist Edison Peñafiel’s video installation debuting Saturday at the Harbor Hall Gallery on the University of South Florida St. Petersburg campus.

Fourteen boats, each packed with people – 81 in all, larger than life-sized – silently circumnavigate the room on a continual loop. The boats, and their passengers, bob up and down slowly on animated waves of paint and charcoal. The men and women move and turn, observing one another and watching the water for signs of … what, exactly?

Every person is wearing a mask, with bizarre, painted-on facial expressions and oversized features.

In stark and shadowy black and white, the effect is odd but strangely compelling. It’s like German expressionist filmmaking – it’s real but it’s not. That makes it hard to look away.

MARE MAGNVM is immersive. It is the room. It takes each boat 30 minutes to loop around the entire gallery.

Peñafiel is making a commentary about exiles fleeing one country for another – trading this uncertainty for that uncertainty. The Ecuador-born artist lives in Miami, and he was inspired by the sad and seemingly never-ending parade of Cuban refugees arriving on makeshift watercraft; cultural alienation and separation are recurring themes in his other work.

Subtitled A Floridian Odyssey/Una Odisea en la Florida, the installation will be on view through Oct. 26.

Edison Peñafiel

St. Pete Catalyst: What is this piece saying to us?

Edison Peñafiel: It talks about the perpetual journeys that people do. Not a specific people, but the idea of the journey or the situation of navigating seas, for millennia. There are boats made out of oil drums, and other materials, and there are Viking boats … all representing different areas of the world. Also, the characters do not represent any specific region, or age group … any specific demographic.

What does the title mean?

MARE MAGNVUM is the name that the Romans gave to the old Mediterranean Sea. It means “the great sea” – mare is Latin for sea and magnum is great. There are other etymologies I use with this context, and that are conceptually present in the piece. Mare also mean mother, and it’s a proto-Germanic word for nightmare. It’s also a demon in Nordic languages.

So we have the nightmare, we have the mother and we have the sea. So to put these three concepts together I have used a Latin American lullaby to be the soundscape for the installation. The lullaby talks about the sea.

So using the lullaby, we bring in the mother trying to calm the child – these people ARE the child, being rocked by the sea. I guess these characters are subconsciously trying to get to that safe space by humming this lullaby. It’s played by a cello and it’s deconstructed.

So they are remembering, little by little, each part of the lullaby until they complete the whole thing.

Why are they wearing masks?

The masks are originally from Ecuador, where I’m from. They are used in religious celebrations, and also this activity that we have at the end of the year, called Año Viejo, in which we build life-sized paper doll puppets. Where we used these papier-mâché masks. The paper doll puppet is our representation of the past year.

So on New Year’s Eve, right before midnight, we beat the crap out of these paper doll puppets and we burn them. It’s kind of like a ritual of cleansing to go to the new year. Sometimes these are political figures, or whoever was relevant, good or bad, during the past year.

To me, the material is very important. This material is papier-mâché, which is similar to piñatas, right? And they both go to the struggle of pain and suffering, so I’m using these masks with that layer, but also masks have been used throughout history to cover an identity. To adapt. To hide. So in this case, with migration, it’s the idea of adapting, of covering. … with illegal immigration you need to work with safe documents if you are going to work in a new place. And also, you need to adapt – so you put a mask on. You need to hide from authority, or whoever is persecuting.

It’s very intentional to make the viewer see that it’s a mask.

You created this in 2021?

Yes, for my first solo show in Europe. At the Sabrina Amrani Gallery in Madrid. They have this huge space, for which I originally proposed another piece. But because we didn’t have the funds to do that, MARE MAGNVM was Plan B.

Peñafiel will speak at 11 a.m. Saturday in the Harbor Hall auditorium. The gallery and auditorium are located at 1000 3rd Street S. Website.