- Title
- Moscas (Flies)
- Date Made
- 2021-2023
- Medium
- Silver
- Dimensions
- Each: 1/4 × 1/2 × 1/2 in. (0.64 × 1.27 × 1.27 cm)
- Accession Number
- M.2025.33.1-.100
- Collecting Area
- Latin American Art
- Curatorial Notes
Moscas (Flies), a swarming installation of 100 life-size cast-silver flies, is a provocative commentary on colonialism. Silver has a fraught history in Andrés Bedoya’s native Bolivia. The Spaniards extracted enormous quantities of the precious metal from the mines of the Cerro Rico or “Rich Hill” in Potosí, fueling the Spanish Empire. Indigenous and African laborers—many of whom died due to dangerous and strenuous conditions—mined the metal before it was exported to Europe. Bedoya’s silver flies reference this history of exploitation in Bolivia. The mass of finely crafted, hyperrealistic flies reinforces associations of plague and suggests the ongoing harm of extraction and greed. By creating the pesky fly out of precious metal, Bedoya seeks to call out the tension between attraction and repulsion and raise questions of wealth and decline. Bedoya used traditional jewelry-making practices to craft these fine flies and cast them using the lost-wax method, a technique that was employed by Inka silversmiths and harks back to ancient times.
Rachel Kaplan
2025