4K video, stereo sound
12 minutes
La Isla de Vidrio (The Glass Island) is a video work based on Proyecto Huemul, a secret nuclear project to develop the first fusion reactor in the world. On March of 1951, Argentinian president Juan D. Perón announced that controlled atomic fusion was achieved in Patagonia. The news travelled the world, “Argentina had obtained an endless source of energy.”
The project began in 1948 when Perón funded Austrian scientist Dr. Ronald Richter to work on what many referred to as the Argentine Manhattan Project. Under the new government regime, Perón began recruiting German and Nazi scientists seeking Argentina’s industrial growth and economic independence, and to occupy a “third position” between the US and the URSS. Richter claimed to know the secrets of atomic fusion and was given enormous resources to build vast structures in a secret research facility at Huemul Island in Patagonia. But after some apparent success, the feat that would have been one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century was proved to be fraudulent and was canceled after a couple of years.
To this day, Proyecto Huemul remains largely ignored and poorly understood. Due to the destruction of official records, no more than ten pictures exist of the island and there is no visual record to study the site and the research that was once conducted in the island. La Isla de Vidrio is a tale based in historical facts and speculative fiction narrated by an ambiguous character in between a utopian scientist, a paranoid nationalist and nostalgic positivist. The video features the earliest scientific attempt to achieve endless and free energy while exposing the material evidence of a “failed national utopia” in which notions of fact and fiction, and the relationship between science, technology, politics and the state are all intertwined.
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