One Flew Over the Void

(Bala perdida) is both a film and performance organized by Javier Téllez in Las Playas, Mexico, on the border of Tijuana and San Diego.

The 2005 event featured ordinary citizens, visitors to InSITE (the periodic exhibition for which the work was produced), and patients from a local psychiatric hospital (the last disguised behind animal masks and wielding signs protesting various injustices) parading through the streets of Las Playas to the U.S.-Mexico border. The performance ends with a human cannonball being shot over the border into the United States, a defiant act that transgresses social and political boundaries literally and figuratively, underscoring the hardships faced by the millions of Mexican and Central American workers who cross the border illegally every year in search of a better life.

 

Links

Guggenheim Artist Bio

Guggenheim Artwork Page

Interview with Filmmaker Javier Tellez

Video