Page Back to the Future: On Blas Isasi's 1,001,532 CE at the Ford Motor Plant
Published February 18th 2025
By Joe Craig
Ninety-one years after its assembly operations ceased, the Ford Motor plant in Arabi was repurposed for Prospect's sixth triennial.
Artist Blas Isasi's contribution to Prospect.6 stands out due to its integration with Albert Kahn's industrial architecture. Unlike rafa esparza's crowd-pleasing Mexica Falcon after Dewey Tafoya—which could easily thrive in various settings—Isasi's artwork is wedded to the surrounding environment. Amid the expanse of concrete flooring, Isasi crafts distinctive isles. Sculptural appendages blossom and probe the area, navigating impediment. Sand congeals around a support post and pools near a drainage hole. Unwieldy arcs of looping pine writhe and lasso under an unseen influence, while momentum increases in the tracery of steel tubing.
Isasi's installation is a re-conjuration of the historic encounter in Cajamarca between the Inca and Spanish conquistadors. During the confrontation, the Spaniards, led by Francisco Pizzaro, staged a coup and captured the Incan emperor, Atahualpa. Outnumbered many times over, the Spanish stunned and overwhelmed the mass of assembled Incas with a thunderous explosion of cannon fire and muskets discharged at close range—turning a diplomatic meeting into an unexpected assault. Atahaulpa's capture and subsequent death set into motion the Spanish colonization of Peru.
Capture of Atahualpa on 16 November 1532 by John Everett Millais
Envisioned as occurring in the Common Era of 1,001,532, Isasi's work reimagines the incident at Cajamarca one million years in the future as an active archaeological site. Ascending the stairway to the second floor, the viewer is confronted with a collection of freestanding, plant-like sculptures. As decades-old vegetation encircles and reclaims the building, reshaping the former manufacturing facility towards a state of spontaneous decay, Isasi's encroaching forms reiterate the undercurrent of change.
The Ford Motor plant is the perfect foil for Isasi's sculptural drama—it's dilapidated splendor backlit by windows showcasing the Mississippi river and allowing the shifting light to accentuate the formations of sand, steel, and pine. There’s no shortage of one-of-a-kind components to marvel over. A tentacle-like limb forms a penile glans that spurts a spiraled tress of Incan hair. A quasi-starfish-shaped-terrain-model-cum-helmet of the Andes mountains erupts into a churning cloud of cactus tips. Spreading a gash in the sand, a suspended finger hangs from a beaded ball chain directly across from a clustered mass of berries. Occasionally incongruous features detract—like the high-key color of the fruit, at odds with the artificial finger and synthetic curves of steel—though what saves it from feeling chintzy is the dynamic compartmentalization of each element and the lyric quality of the curving frame.
Installation Images Courtesy of the Artist
Installation Images Courtesy of the Artist
Installation Images Courtesy of the Artist
Offset from the stairway, a latched door (formerly a Women's restroom) is wedged open against a drift of sand that bolsters a suitcase-sized sandstone. Upon closer inspection, the sandstone tapers to form a finger pointing out a scattered pile of glass and rubble. Elsewhere, a nested ear evokes the episode of Atahualpa straining to hear God's voice in a breviary presented by Spanish friar Vincente de Valverde after Valverde claimed the dictates of God were contained in the book. Unfixed and alive, Isasi's conjuration of the Cajamarca Encounter becomes a fluid waterway of possible futures—an event whose outcome is recast in perpetuity, transformed on an inconceivable timescale.
Installation Images Courtesy of the Artist
Installation Images Courtesy of the Artist
Installation Images Courtesy of the Artist
During a four-month period after the occurrence at Cajamarca—running from March to July 1533—all of the ransacked objects containing precious metals—a collection of forty thousand pounds of Inca gold and silver—were fed into furnaces, turning unique Incan artifacts into standardized ingots(1). This process of homogenizing and coding material for trade is the inverse of Isasi's art. Isasi endeavors to re-animate his materials—whether foam, steel, wood, or clay. His installation is a decisive rebuke to the aftermath of the Cajamarca Encounter, where the Spanish conquest extended to the liquidation of the finest objects ever created by the Inca’s artisans. Isasi uncodes the uniformity of industrial materials into odes—his pine becoming capricious, his steel flighty and anarchistic, and his sand refusing to drift—on a mission to limn the confines of its enclosure—the inherent energy unbound.
Citations
1. MacQuarrie, K. (2008) The Last Days of the Incas (pp. 134–135). Little, Brown.