Video documentation of an action carried out in San Jerónimo Park in Seville. On the occasion of the Seville Expo 1992, which celebrated the five-hundredth anniversary of the so-called discovery of America, the Russian artist Zurab Tsereteli created an almost thirty-two-meter-high monument in bronze depicting Christopher Columbus. Titled ‘The Birth of a New Man’, but better known as ‘The Egg of Columbus’, since it portrays him standing inside an enormous egg, the monument allegorizes the story of how Columbus, having been told that discovering the Americas was no great accomplishment, challenged his critics by making an egg stand on its tip. In 2012 Lagomarsino bought twelve eggs at a supermarket in Buenos Aires and illegally carried them to Seville. For each part of the journey he packed them carefully, to make sure they would not break. There, he met up with his father, who lives in Spain, having exiled from Argentina in 1976. Together they threw the eggs at the monument, in this way giving them back to the ‘conquistador’ – an action at once pathetic and glorious.
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Histories That Nothing Are
Runo Lagomarsino
2003, 00:04:40