David Sanchez Burr- Stardusted

(El Mundo se Olvida Nadar)

Single Channel Video 520129.97 NTSC 2009

A performance is worth a thousand memories. Stardusted is a video that features a performance at the Stardust Casino on October 31, the day before its closure in 2006 and a video of the casinos implosion on March 13, 2007. The implosion of a Casino may not seem that big of a deal in a town where reinvention is not only a mantra but a self preservation skill. The effect of implosions is also a warping of memory a catastrophy wrapped in a spectacle. In a region where non native history is a relative blink of an eye it is rare that nostalgia, sincere and heartfelt, gushes out like an artesian well. This is precisely what happened with the closing of the Stardust. The implosion was intended to make space for a new and more modern resort property. The Stardust was a placeholder of memories of a more “classic” era, an era packed with human stories, a concentration of nostalgia. Like many structures in history we try to preserve the symbolic, sometimes we are only left with the memory.