CASSILES The urgency of “In Plain Sight” has become paramount as people began dying of Covid-19 in detention camps. Initially we had planned for this project to take place without any press, but when the pandemic hit, we launched our Instagram page featuring short interviews with our artists and calls to action. It has been a great opportunity to take action. In the past few months, I have canceled or paused 11 exhibitions. Almost every artist I know has it, too.
There is a rich history of artists seeking inspiration in heaven. Yves Klein used it as inspiration for his conceptual blue paintings. Recently, artist Jammie Holmes flew George Floyd’s final words above five cities across the country. What other works have inspired your skytyping project?
ESPARZA “Repellent Fence” (2015) by the Postcommodity art collective was particularly important to us. They created a metaphorical suture along the migration route between the United States and Mexico with tied balloons to talk about the art of the land in relation to permanence and changing landscapes. In the same way that they used earth to speak about the divisive power of colonial structures, we hope to index heaven as a symbol of inspiration and hope. And heaven can migrate messages across borders. When our message is overwhelmed to San Diego, the words will probably go to Tijuana. And when our words are written over Los Angeles, they will have a shared orbital path, allowing phrases like “Abolition Now” and “Stop Crime Now” to come together in a circular message.
CASSILES We are also thinking of artists who have used the language of advertising to convey their points. Artists like Lynda Benglis and Barbara Hammer. The AIDS Memorial Quilt was another important reference because it demonstrates how people can come together through a mosaic of activism.
Many artists involved in the project are also rare, which may or may not be a coincidence. We are thinking of the words of José Esteban Muñoz, who wrote in 2009 that “extravagance exists for us as an ideal that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future.” We see liberation for queer, migrant, and black communities so deeply united because they are all rooted in the problems of white supremacy and colonization. Our job as queer artists is to imagine the future.
ESPARZA And we are putting the care proposal, which is central to many queer communities, at the forefront of this project. We want to imagine what care is like for people affected by the detention of migrants and Covid-19.
CASSILES Taking the skytypers into the fold has also been a unique experience. And with some messages written in Cree, Farsi, and Urdu, this will be the first time that many people will see their own languages in the sky. There has also been a challenge to imagine how to write languages in the sky that do not use the Roman alphabet. Skytypers generally work in fleets of five planes each, so any image or letter must exist along a five point matrix. For the artists on the project, that means experimenting with the grid and drawing words like “freedom” in Farsi or Urdu. It is interesting to look at the challenges of what we can put in heaven and how we could overcome those barriers.
In sight
Find out how to see art at: instagram.com/inplainsightmap/
