Santiago Sierra | Other People’s Problems
Born in Spain in 1966, lives and works in Madrid
Destroyed Words, 2012, video, 29:08 minutes
Santiago Sierra’s project Destroyed Words, which was initiated in 2010, involved the construction of 10 giant letters in 10 different countries. Each letter was made using a resource that is economically vital to the country in question, and was then spectacularly annihilated in a process recorded on film. Read in consecutive order, these letters spell out the word “KAPITALISM.” Yet since they were not created and destroyed in this order, it was only following the construction of the last letter in Melbourne, Australia, that the meaning of the word was revealed. As the actions performed in the different countries came together to spell out this global phenomenon, they clarified the full meaning of this project as a parable about destruction and its paradoxical relationship to production – a pivotal theme in Sierra’s work.
