«Destino manifesto» (Manifest Destiny) is a project that reflects on the sadistic behavior of the human being to achieve the objectives of geographical, political and racial expansion. It establishes as a starting point the characteristics of the instruments created to
monitor and punish, addressing the specific case of the violence of the German national socialism and the well-known tortures of the Abu Ghraib prison [Iraq], in order to develop, ultimately, a debate about the architecture of power.
The starting point is a photographic triptych realized in Germany in 2012, during the residence of the artist in the Karl Hofer Gesellschaft e.V. Of the Freundeskreis der Universität der Künste in Berlin, which documents: 1. The appearance of the fireplace in the meeting room of Villa Gross Wannsee [Lake Wannsee, Berlin] where the high SS commanders gathered there adopted the «Final Solution» on January 20, 1942. 2. The appearance of one of the watchtowers / animal hunt that abound in the German forests and 3. One of the watchtowers of the camp. Concentration / extermination of Sachsenhausen in Oranienburg [Berlin].
The project includes an artist’s notebook, a series of 5 prototypes and an installation. The artist’s notebook covers the entire research period of the project [2014/2015] through drawings, sketches, drawings, photographs and text notes. The prototypes, models of three dimensions realized at 1:20 scale and definitive material, reproduce up to 5 possible installations of greater format. The final sculptural piece or installation is composed of a light box semi-concealed by a gypsum lattice whose square holes recall those present on the walls of the Abu Ghraib jail, and the photograph described above, of the chimney of Villa Gross Wannsee, superimposed on the two previous structures.
The title of the project is taken from the term Manifest Destiny, the doctrine that expresses the belief that the United States is a nation destined to expand, originally, from the coasts of the Atlantic to the Pacific. The puritanical minister Sofi G wrote in 1630: «No nation has the right to expel another if it is not by a special design of heaven as the Israelites had, unless the natives acted unjustly with it. Right to enter into, legally, a war with them as well as to submit them. » The term was first used in the «U.S. By John L. O’Sullivan in New York in July 1845, to justify the American expansion into the Western lands, which had begun well before the declaration of independence of the thirteen English colonies. From that time on, the so-called «doctrine of manifest destiny» took shape, which was the set of geo-political and geo-economic ideas that justified North American expansionism, and by virtue of which it was logical and necessary to conquer new territories To extend the colonial inheritance of the United States, located until that moment in the east coast of the continent. According to this ideology, geographical expansion is obvious (manifest) and accurate (destiny).
The doctrine of Manifest Destiny has an analogous idea that expresses the German term Lebensraum, that is, the theory of the «vital space» used by the German national socialism. Adolf Hitler used the Lebensraum terminology to describe the need for the Third Reich to find new territories to expand: «Germans have the moral right to acquire foreign territories through which population growth is expected» – Mein Kampf. The idea was not to restore frontiers prior to the outbreak of World War I (1914), but to conquer new lands to ensure the survival of the Aryan race. Biology became a determinant of the fundamental values of the national community.
