The sound barrier

2017, Matta Cultural Center - Embassy of Chile, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Airplane scale 64 inch Fiberglass. Found toys and painted white. The sound barrier speaks of the drama of war and children.

Photographic record

© Norton Maza

Through their toys, children invent thousands of stories. And each toy, in turn, tells the story of its child. The toy comes to life, the object offers meaning to the child's first months and years. That is the justification for the need to play.

A found toy is a testimony of broken illusions. The abandonment of the doll, the miniature truck or the water pistol may be due to an accident, to its replacement, to the overcoming of childhood, or in some cases to the abrupt intrusion of the adult. Norton Maza, as in other of his creations, resorts to the rescue of helpless toys to give rise to a reflection on this last vicissitude. The game interrupted because of the problems generated by adults.

In the case of The Sound Barrier, the toys that the artist redeems from fairs, or saves from the trash, invite us to think about the drama of war and its impact on childhood development. The sound barrier, that frontier crossed by a high-speed airplane, that almost inaudible explosion that implies a monstrous release of energy. The sound converted in this work into a floating sculpture is an allegory of childhood itself, which is pierced by a war machine. Its collision with the atmosphere is barely audible, but its consequences are devastating.

The F-16 that Maza recreates drags behind it a semi-cone of small toys scattered through the air, simulating the real phenomenon that the plane produces when it breaks the sound barrier. Each toy, painted in white, tells of a broken life, a broken childhood, by the tragic action of a war machine. It is a thousandth of a second stopped, frozen in space, but expressing the sadness of an irreparable loss.

Regarding Norton Maza's work with toys we can reread Walter Benjamin: “When the impulse to play suddenly invades an adult, this does not mean a relapse into childhood. Of course playing always implies a liberation. In playing children, surrounded by a world of giants, create a small one that is right for them; the adult, on the other hand, surrounded by the threat of the real, takes horror out of the world by making of it a reduced copy.” (Works. Book IV/vol. 1, Abada, 2010, 470). The artist as a generator of tiny simulacra to fight against the suicidal endeavor of humanity.

Text: Juan José Santos