For “DEMO,” Yoshua Okón and Juan Obando hired the services of “Crowds On Demand,” an LA-based Astroturfing agency, to organize a protest in Phoenix, AZ. They commissioned a demonstration that employs the most common performative paradigms of contemporary civil action and the replacement of a specific cause with silent gestures and empty digital green signs. In “DEMO,” this color takes center stage, formally and functionally.

Obando and Okón designed the gallery space as a product demonstration by the “Crowds On Demand” company. Here the artists openly present the crowds for rent industry as an efficient and effective propaganda machine where its products and services intersect with abstract forms to create tension between the real and the fictional, the organic and the artificial. In this context, they articulate the piece as a video installation that radiates from a mobile container with an exaggerated graphic identity, projecting scenes of the commissioned protest.

“DEMO” proposes a structural visualization of the connections derived from contemporary Astroturfing. They link the perceptive takeover of our political imagination with the expansion of capitalism, the configuration of neoliberal ideology, the normalization of corruption, accelerated virality, social media engineering, and, finally, the neutralization of civil action through the instrumentalization of social movements.