Abstract
Monumento V [Monument V] is part of an ongoing series of performative monuments that confront the historical and ongoing dispossession of racialized, gendered, and marginalized bodies. In this iteration, the artist stands naked on a pedestal while four white Mexican men hold wooden planks that conceal his body from view. As their physical strength deteriorates over time, the planks fall away, slowly exposing the artist’s body to the public. This durational performance stages the body as both a site and symbol of dispossession—hidden, controlled, and ultimately revealed through exhaustion and rupture.
Across the Monumento [Monument] series—presented in spaces from El Museo del Barrio to the Guggenheim, Dakar, and Guadalajara—the artist constructs ephemeral tributes to those historically excluded by colonial, patriarchal, and Eurocentric orders: Black, Indigenous, queer, migrant, and impoverished bodies. Each piece reclaims visibility, presence, and memory through the body’s endurance, fragility, and resistance. Monumento V, commissioned for inSURrecciones at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, extends this lineage by laying bare the structures that render certain bodies invisible in public space. In doing so, it reclaims the body not as a monument to power, but as a living archive of pain, erasure, and survival.
Citation
Martiel, Carlos. 'Monumento V [Monument V]+N161'. Dispossessions in the Americas. https://staging.dia.upenn.edu/en/art/AMEX005/

