CHICAGO, IL.- Centered on the community interests of residents in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood, Adela Goldbard’s The Last Judgment features large-scale sculptures built as pyrotechnic scenography for a public pyrotechnic event to be presented in Little Village on October 12, 2019. As a multi-part project, The Last Judgment creatively draws on Mexican traditions and artistry to spectacularly address and ritually purge the challenges facing Chicago’s Little Village.

The sculptures—built by master artisans of Artsumex collective in Tultepec (Mexico’s pyrotechnic capital)— derive from the struggles, life experiences, and resilience of Little Village residents, as well as concerns about environmental justice and gentrification. The sites, sets, and stories were collaboratively determined in a series of summer 2019 workshops that Goldbard and collaborating teaching artists held with multigenerational Little Village residents in schools, community centers, and other neighborhood locations. The Last Judgment is a bridge between organization, artists, artisans, activists, Mexican and Mexican-American communities across Chicago neighborhoods and across the border.

With a multilingual narrative (Spanish, English, and Náhuatl), The Last Judgment’s takes its name from the first Western play performed in present-day Mexico. In the XVI century, Franciscan priest Andrés de Olmos wrote The Last Judgment in Náhuatl as a religious tool of conquest. Goldbard’s Last Judgment evokes the spectacular character of that theater of evangelization but contests its colonizing and moralizing spirit, transforming punishment and subjugation into protest and criticality through processes of collective building, reenactment, and destruction.

In the October 12 performance, pyrotechnic effects and fireworks will be used as special effects and to partially destroy the sculptures, transforming the spectacle into an allegorical, cathartic collective purging of the social ills addressed in the narratives. As such, the performance will trace a link between the spectacular use of fireworks in Spanish evangelical theater and present-day Mexican practices of burning effigies, whether Judas Iscariot, pop cultural icons, monsters and mythical creatures, or political figures. The Last Judgment adopts the allegorical destruction of evil embedded in these pagan, religious, and political pyrotechnic immolations of effigies and becomes both a protest and a celebration.

The Last Judgment builds on Goldbard’s practice of initiating collaborative artworks that are ritually and cathartically destroyed. Goldbard has, over the last six years, been developing and presenting public performances that feature the ritual destruction of large-scale sculptures in allegories of contentious Mexican historical and contemporary events. For Goldbard, “Collectively building, staging, and destroying has the potential to generate critical thinking and social transformation.” Past performances have been staged in multiple public squares of Mexican cities, such as Zacatecas and Queretaro City, as well as at Pomona College, California as part of a group exhibition featured in the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative.

Specific events referenced in Goldbard’s work have included notorious helicopter crashes that killed high ranking Mexican federal officials, Mexican media coverage of political corruption and the drug war, and a federal police attack on Oaxacan protesters and subsequent suppression of the story. Goldbard’s artwork has questioned which events get remembered, recorded, and commemorated by exhuming events buried by dominant narratives, but has also been structured to enable critical collectivity and to create tools to remember, repair, reconcile, reimagine, re-own, and resist.