Trópico Entrópico is part of a series of works entitled Post-Colonial Floors which open a debate upon the process of acculturation.
For this sculpture in white and brown sugar, the artist takes inspiration from the pattern of a black and white mosaic created in the 19th century to evoke the Meeting of Waters near Manaus, in Brazil. At this confluence, the two streams whose waters are respectively ochre and black flow together without mixing for six kilometres. This anomaly well-known in South America, has become a metaphor for the cultural assimilation imposed by colonialism.
The choice of sugar is not random, as it refers to the principal motivation of colonial empires: the exploitation of natural resources. Fragile, interactive and evolutionary, the work proposes to “think of the colonisation of the American continent as a slow process of cultural entropy”. The white and brown sugars form separate, adjacent waves in a precarious equilibrium, creating a pattern that leads to evolution, mixing and homogenisation over the course of the exhibition. Indeed, for Felipe Arturo, the work is complete when its geometric order has been transformed by the public.