Third World Space Modules Blueprints

The work of El Salvador artist Simón Vega includes drawings, installations, sculpture and happenings inspired by informal architecture, stalls in local markets and the carts of street sellers in Central America. Assembled with recycled materials, these works parody the forms of Mayan pyramids, modernist buildings and contemporary sureveillance systems between the First World and Third World.
These drawings reflect the Space Race between the USA and the Soviet Union, an icon of the Cold War, making a “tropical” and ironic reading of that process and its consequences in a Central American context. In these types of works, defined by the artist as Tropical Space Proyectos, space technology is related to daily methods of survival such as popular markets and informal architecture in El Salvador.
Some of Vega’s drawings serve as plans to carry out three-dimensional pieces, while others refer to already made sculptures, such as the three capsules of the monumental sculpture Palm 3 World Station, inspired by the MIR space station of the Soviet Space programme; a fourth drawing, on a larger scale, alludes to NASA’s Apollo module and was conceived for the twenty-first Paiz Art Biennial in 2018. Suset Sánchez Sánchez