For the past 5 years, the MCAD MFA program has partnered with other arts organizations to co-sponsor funded MFA Launch programs, providing opportunities for MFA students and alumni to create new work. This past summer, as part of a new Launch program at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts (thanks to Anika Schneider, MFA ’19), Victor Sánchez, MFA ‘24, installed The Benevolent Tornado at the MCBA Outlook Gallery. Victor shares reflections on their experience with interviewer Malini Basu, MFA 24’.
Malini: Can you introduce us to your installation in the MCBA Outlook Gallery?
Victor: The proposal is as follows, there’s a benevolent tornado speeding ferociously over a neighborhood, leaving a debris of banned words, stories, ideas, and wisdom within books that it picked up from warehouses where they were stored by fearful people. The tornado would then litter the words, stories, ideas, and wisdom within books around municipal buildings and neighborhood streets, giving people back access to use, read, explore, and share them.
What I see I’m creating is a fierce, powerful weather system as an act of nature that has responded to the fears and anxieties of some fearful people towards differences in humanity, except this tornado acts in a way that is magnanimous, fantastic, and unusual. This tornado is a generous and compassionate tornado, like a gentle breeze, causing people to feel grateful, changed, and optimistic. This tornado, instead of carrying along fear, debris, and destruction, carries and brings back the words, stories, ideas, and wisdom within books that help humanity to act to restore, reconcile, and heal nature and life.
This act is in direct contrast to human negligent behavior. Because this tornado cares for and protects the interests of people and nature and its resources, it, by its behavior, in turn scolds those inhumanities that are done by the fearful and powerful who would oppress and marginalize others. This tornado comes to the aid of all humanity, not with terror as a response to human carelessness and neglect, but with an act of love to restore the voices of thinkers, storytellers, and truth-givers from those who would suppress them.
The purpose of this tornado is to find every warehouse in the country used by the merchants of fear that would hold, hide, and restrict the words, stories, ideas, and wisdom within books needed to bring life, balance, justice and harmony to humanity. As this tornado reaches down to earth from the sky it is driven by an act of restorative justice, it sniffs out the stench and foul odor of selfish interests and pursuits aimed to restrict and distort reality.
You can see that this tornado is selective and distinguishes where and to whom it is directing its gaze and justice. It’s very important to know that not one person is destroyed in this pursuit. This tornado is compassionate, and considerate. The warehouses that stored the words, stories, ideas, and wisdom within books are lifted off the ground, deconstructed, and carefully sorted through to separate the valuable items they carry for the purpose of returning them to humanity where they belong. Viewers should also see this as an intelligent tornado. I like it when my work is a part of the political discourse. Essentially the exhibit is a response to our current political censorship and book banning anxiety in the USA.
M: Knowing your background as a museum exhibit designer, I wonder if that changed the way you approached viewer experience?
V: Because of my work in museums and exhibits as a designer, I’m made aware of how important it is for the audience’s sensory experience to play a role in feeling the emotional power of the message. I couldn’t see how narrow and shallow the space was until I was there, and realized then I would need to make some adjustments. I’m very fortunate to have had the window street view for this exhibit and I worked it as if it were a shop window display for a department store.
M: The MCBA Outlook Gallery is a tall, narrow space with a large window facing the street. How did this site affect the way you installed your work?
V: I took the strong vertical scale and thrust of the space and used them to my advantage. That allowed me to exaggerate and emphasize the natural need to look up. I then created a sculptural element that barely fit in the space, freely suspended it, and gave it the appearance of bursting apart. With this look above one’s head it has the potential to automatically make one feel the oppressiveness and catastrophic threat of the object as if at any moment it would fall from the sky and hit the floor, but doesn’t.
The painted mural of a tornado in the background of the exhibit supported the physical spiraling tornado that stretched from the ceiling to the floor that then carried all the flying paper and the paper peace cranes. I had the wonderful support of everyone at MCBA and they were gracious with my needs, especially because it got very warm in the space as the afternoon sun shone in, and they allowed me a fan. At times it was a dizzying experience going up so high on the ladder to attach all the suspended elements, but they were all so kind and accommodating that I’m grateful for the experience.
