América Letrina

Damián Ortega

Letrine America

Five years before Ortega made this sculpture, the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect—at the same time as “Latin American identity” was being debated in the cultural sphere. With a Duchampian air, Ortega avails himself of strategies from conceptual art to resignify and alter a utilitarian object, offering ironic commentary on the reductionist notion of Latin America as a kind of drop box, drain, or secondary channel at the service of “the northern powers.”