Yoshua Okón’s Octopus 2011 is a two-screen video work by the Mexican artist Yoshua Okón.
In a provocation typical of Okón’s practice, he films a group of Guatemalan men in the parking lot of a Home Depot in California – a place where they and other undocumented workers gather to seek manual labouring work such as gardening – with the men performing the coordinated movements they were trained in as fighters, amongst unsuspecting shoppers and their cars.
In the second video, the artist explains his inspiration for the work, and the process undertaken to create it.