EDISON PEÑAFIEL: MARE MAGNVM (A Floridian Odyssey/Una Odisea en la Florida)

Edison Peñafiel is an interdisciplinary artist who manipulates drawing, sculpture, photography, and video to decontextualize and then reconstruct absurd scenarios; these, in turn, question poverty, prejudice, exploitation, and myriad forms of abuse of power. His immersive work uses various forms of advanced media to create empathy by highlighting unlocatable stories that affect the oppressed—global narratives that question the assumptions of Western societies as they mismanage, often cruelly, multiple world-girding crises. 

His latest large-scale project, MARE MAGNVM (A Floridian Odyssey/Una Odisea en la Florida) consists of a panoramic video installation featuring a stylized, iterative, monochromatic sea populated by 14 boats, each ferrying its own unique collection of figures caught in a perpetual loop. Every 30 minutes on the dot, the film’s characters arrive back where they began. Like the Greek myth of Sisyphus, where the legend’s protagonist was eternally condemned to roll a boulder up a hill only to have it roll down again, Peñafiel’s anonymous figures appear trapped in a cycle of struggle, near success, and failure. Despite their being projected larger than life, their boats are contrived from various found objects, including wood, oil drums, and tires, suggesting scenarios of human migration across bodies of water akin to situations both contemporary and historical.

MARE MAGNVM, the title Peñafiel selected for his installation, comes from the Latin for “Great Sea”—a term the Romans used to describe the Mediterranean Sea as part of a liquid ring they believed encircled the earth. Additionally, the word “mare” has a complicated history: it has long been associated with evil spirits and terrors in various cultures and languages, including in Old Irish and Old English. Today, the waters of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, along with other well-trod telluric sites of mass migration, reflect an ongoing horror, as millions of migrants flee war, instability, and climate change. In this sense, MARE MAGNVM fails to cite any single one migration event, but rather metaphorically expands the idea of mass displacement to encompass migration at a planetary scale. A mesmerizing artwork that is also designed to be an enveloping experience, MARE MAGNVM steeps viewers in the eternal slough that is crossing borders, while alerting this same public to a future in which rising waters will push unprecedented numbers of people away from the places they call home. 

Because MARE MAGNVM does not refer to a single, locatable group of people or event, no extraneous information is provided about the history or place of origin of the artwork’s principal characters. With their faces purposefully hidden by papier-mâché masks typical of Peñafiel’s native Ecuador—think the use of masks in Greek and Japanese Noh theater—the film’s figures are both redacted and humanized by their use of face coverings. Eschewing any single religion, ethnicity, or nationality, they appear identified instead by their anonymous striving: boatloads of unnamed and faceless individuals, everywoman and everyman, who are thus transformed into representatives of diasporic populations throughout history.  

“The absurd is lucid reason noting its limits,” Albert Camus wrote in The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays (a book that served as a touchstone for generations looking for meaning during two world wars and the subsequent ongoing threat of atomic extinction). Camus began work on the volume in 1940 as France fell and millions of refugees emptied out European cities like Warsaw, Brussels, and Paris. Like Camus, Peñafiel also taps into the memory of these 20th century refugees. His ultimate purpose: to recover the sense of absurdity attendant to large scale human suffering, as well as the fellow feeling that appears increasingly necessary to engender human sympathy. MARE MAGNVM (A Floridian Odyssey/Una Odisea en la Florida) brings these and other ideas home to South Florida. The installation serves as a wakeup call—for everyone, but perhaps especially for those long on shame and short on memory.

Christian Viveros-Fauné
Curator-at-Large, USF Contemporary Art Museum

MARE MAGNVM was produced with the technical and creative support of MADLABS and Immersiva. Music interpreted by Jonathan Gerstner.
EDISON PEÑAFIEL: MARE MAGNVM (A Floridian Odyssey/Una Odisea en la Florida) is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. GENERATOR: USFCAM and its programs are supported by USF College of The Arts; USF St. Petersburg; the Lee and Victor Leavengood Endowment; and the St. Petersburg Downtown Partnership.