Images 002
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AE—008
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AE—008
Exhibited:
Aperture Summer Open, New York. September. 2020.
Images Singulières, Sete, France. May 2019.
Photo Isreal, Tel Aviv, Isreal. November. 2019.
Encontros da Imagem, Braga, Portugal. September. 2019.
Parallel Inersection, Budapest, Hungary. September 2019.
Homesession Gallery, Barcelona, Spain. August. 2018.
Press:
British Journal of Photography, September, 2018
El Nacional, August, 2018. Phmuseum, February, 2019.
Publication:
A Study of Assassination, 2019.
Exhibition Film:
https://youtu.be/MYqcKI8vTj4
A Study of Assassination
In 1997, the CIA declassified a document titled A Study of Assassination, believed to have been written in 1953 as part of a covert U.S. operation to overthrow Guatemala’s democratically elected president, Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán. The coup, orchestrated by the CIA and backed by United Fruit Company—then the region’s dominant corporate power—was framed as an anti-communist intervention but ultimately secured American economic interests. The coup’s legacy was catastrophic: 31 years of military rule, over 100,000 deaths, and the deepening of corporate imperialism in Central America.
At the heart of this project is an interrogation of how covert operations, state-sanctioned violence, and propaganda shape historical memory. The work engages directly with A Study of Assassination, a manual designed to “educate” CIA-trained mercenaries in the act of killing—though its absurd detachment from reality led some to dismiss it as a joke. The project recontextualizes the manual through photomontage, juxtaposing its clinical instructions with archival press images, United Fruit advertising campaigns, and Cold War propaganda. Through this, it examines the visual and linguistic strategies used to justify imperial violence, while highlighting the cultural absurdities embedded within them.
A second component of the project explores the tension between fact and fiction by translating the assassination manual into staged photographic sequences. Blurring documentary and performance, these images literalize the manual’s instructions, questioning the extent to which history is shaped not only by events themselves but by the narratives constructed around them.
This work extends my ongoing artistic inquiry into how dominant histories are constructed, manipulated, and mediated through imagery. By exposing the aesthetic strategies of power—through montage, archival intervention, and subversion of context—it interrogates the mechanisms that obscure historical violence, while considering how collective memory is shaped, eroded, and rewritten.
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In 1997, the CIA declassified a document titled A Study of Assassination, believed to have been written in 1953 as part of a covert U.S. operation to overthrow Guatemala’s democratically elected president, Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán. The coup, orchestrated by the CIA and backed by United Fruit Company—then the region’s dominant corporate power—was framed as an anti-communist intervention but ultimately secured American economic interests. The coup’s legacy was catastrophic: 31 years of military rule, over 100,000 deaths, and the deepening of corporate imperialism in Central America.
At the heart of this project is an interrogation of how covert operations, state-sanctioned violence, and propaganda shape historical memory. The work engages directly with A Study of Assassination, a manual designed to “educate” CIA-trained mercenaries in the act of killing—though its absurd detachment from reality led some to dismiss it as a joke. The project recontextualizes the manual through photomontage, juxtaposing its clinical instructions with archival press images, United Fruit advertising campaigns, and Cold War propaganda. Through this, it examines the visual and linguistic strategies used to justify imperial violence, while highlighting the cultural absurdities embedded within them.
A second component of the project explores the tension between fact and fiction by translating the assassination manual into staged photographic sequences. Blurring documentary and performance, these images literalize the manual’s instructions, questioning the extent to which history is shaped not only by events themselves but by the narratives constructed around them.
This work extends my ongoing artistic inquiry into how dominant histories are constructed, manipulated, and mediated through imagery. By exposing the aesthetic strategies of power—through montage, archival intervention, and subversion of context—it interrogates the mechanisms that obscure historical violence, while considering how collective memory is shaped, eroded, and rewritten.
