In 1988, shortly after the end of Uruguay’s military dictatorship (1973–1985), Camnitzer represented his home country at the 43rd Venice Biennale. His contribution was the first of many large-scale multimedia installations he has staged in the intervening decades. It contained numerous tableaus in which peculiar arrangements of physical objects, printed images, and text indicated the insidious psychological agony of imprisonment and political violence.
Camnitzer expanded upon those themes in El Mirador [The Observatory] (1996), a room-sized installation first staged at the 23rd São Paulo Biennial in 1996. The work is a large black cube, the interior of which is viewable only through a narrow horizontal opening located at eye level. The starkly lit, white-walled room visible within is recognizable as a domestic interior complete with a bed, mirror, dining table, window, lamp, newspapers, and a clothes hanger. But the uncanny details of these objects are unmissable. The iron bed frame has a single glass sheet as a mattress; the wall mirror is shattered; the windowpanes are made of artificial grass. The prevailing atmosphere is at once clinical and hallucinatory, destabilizing viewers’ initial interpretations while implicating them in the act of surveillance.