This week in our print edition, Catherine Wagley writes about a bizarre video art project from Mexico City-based artist Yoshua Okón, in which he restaged the Guatemalan civil war using former soldiers from the war who are now day laborers in L.A. He filmed these scenes in the parking lot of the Home Depot in Cypress, where the laborers now come every day to seek work. The completed video project is now at the Hammer Museum.

She writes:

You don't have to know anything about these men or their particular backgrounds to lose yourself in the action. It's enough to know you're watching bodies still wholly fluent in the stealth and agility of combat, and yet weirdly comfortable in the space of Home Depot. “It feels like a sort of transport occurred,” Okón says. “Their bodies are in the parking lot, but they're somewhere else, almost as if I had taken footage from one place and transposed it over another.”

Read the full story here: Yoshua Okon at the Hammer Museum

Advertising disclosure: We may receive compensation for some of the links in our stories. Thank you for supporting LA Weekly and our advertisers.