MONUMENTAL INTERVENTIONS: SELECTIONS FROM SECRET CITY

Sept 2nd-10th 2021

Monumental Interventions is an online exhibition of video works, text, and archival materials
selected from Secret City (ongoing), a body of work by Evan Apodaca, which explores the
military industry’s disfigurement of San Diego, California as well as the region’s history of
political dissent toward the military — ranging from shipyard strikes of the early 1940’s, various
sit-ins, naval mutinies, sabotage campaigns of the late 1960’s and including current-day forms
of anti-imperialist critique.

Apodaca’s last film to screen publicly, Que Lejos Estoy: Picturing Assimilation (2016) was an
animated documentary which streamed nationally through PBS. Since then he has begun
incorporating interviewees’ and actors’ performances into a more advanced process of
animation and storytelling. The short video pieces in Monumental Interventions are the result of
a number of performed dialogues and interviews conducted using a process of facial-motion
capture to surrealistically bring to life dismantled and displaced public statues, sculptural busts
and architecture poetically strewn around the city.

Video to Share
Behind the Scenes of Secret City – https://vimeo.com/458668738

For Apodaca the decision to explore the topic of the military has been brewing for a while.
“While it’s not a hot topic per se, San Diego’s connection to imperialist injustices around the
world is the elephant in the room that has been off the larger public radar for quite a while,” he
says. The short films in the exhibition delve into various topics from the city’s industrial
development to local history of the antiwar movement from the late 1960s and current day
examples of U.S. intervention and its implications in San Diego.

The larger body of work includes an augmented reality app and a feature-length documentary
film. This forthcoming documentary film tells the story about two anti-establishment youth who
must escape military and police surveillance after they are suspected of distributing
self-published leftist literature throughout the navy in San Diego at the height of the anti-war
movement.

Event Location
https://secretcitysd.com/

Instagram:
@secretcity.sd

Facebook:
@secretcityfilm

Resources:
https://www.nalac.org/members/evan-apodaca/
Que Lejos Estoy: Picturing Assimilation (2016)