Daniel Silvo

Daniel Silvo (Cádiz, 1982). Artist, curator, professor at Nebrija University and holder of a PhD in Fine Arts from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (2011).
Recent solo exhibitions include shows at the Slowtrack gallery (2016), Fondation Suisse in Paris (2015), the Isabel Hurley gallery (2014) and the Centro Cultural de España en México (2013).
He has taken part in group shows in La Casa Encendida (2014, 2012 and 2005), the CAAC in Seville (2016 and 2013), the Anozero Contemporary Art Biennial in Coimbra (2015), the Centro Wilfredo Lam (Havana 2011), Fondation Cartier (Paris, 2005) and MNCARS (2002). Among his various awards, he has received grants under the Generaciones Caja Madrid scheme (2012 and 2005), and residencies at CANTE San Luis Potosí (2013), ImpaktWorks Utrecht (2012) and BilbaoArte (2009).
He currently heads the Atelier Solar work, study and discussion center (Madrid).

Dust/Polvo, 2016
(Video, 39′)

The central thesis of this work is that video art is the pillar that sustains land art. The latter’s modifications of landscape were able to reach the public thanks to photography and video, which have played a vital role in its development.
Land art, as such, is a major inspiration for this project, alongside the road movie genre and the phenomenon of time capsules, those simple metal boxes filled with everyday objects buried in order to be discovered years later.
It is also a kind of curatorship, since I select a series of interrelated works by artists, placing them at different points in space.
The Dust/Polvo project involves the abandonment of four works by well-known Mexican artists at four points close to the Mexican border. These sites, in the states of California, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas, coincide with places of transit of Mexican migrants in their progress through the USA. The idea arose when I heard of the work being done by Tucson Samaritans to the south of the city of Tucson: leaving drums of water, tinned food and blankets under the trees in areas where migrants would pass by on foot.
I abandon the four artworks in these out-of-the-way spots within the U.S. landscape. Created by artists Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Felipe Ehrenberg, Sarah Minter and Alejandro Almanza, they are a kind of work typically found in galleries, objects with a market price that are nonetheless abandoned in remote, unknown places.
The leaving of the artworks is recorded in a video that recreates the journey and the action unfolding along the route that takes us from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico along the southernmost highways of the USA. ‘Dust/Polvo’ transforms gallery works into pieces of land art, in a reversal of the process followed by artists like Smithson from nature to the gallery.