Antonio Vega Macotela’s forceful, research-driven work critically examines provocative topics in social history with an emphasis on power dynamics and the exchange value of human labor. The Chisel and the Sinkhole takes the form of an outsize, interactive music box. The work consists of a wooden cylinder outfitted with iron chisels that serve as the teeth of the music box. As the cylinder rotates, the chisels push down on a set of hammers, causing them to strike metal pipes in sequence, resulting in a series of clanging tones that make up a delicate melody. The melody belongs to a song that was famously incanted by Black slaves around the time of a violent uprising in a Colombian mining town during the last decade of the 18th century. In the same decade as the uprising, Swiss watchmaker Antoine Fabre invented the classic European music box. Often displaying fine craftsmanship, this object was a highly sought-after luxury item throughout the Age of Enlightenment. Amplified to a surrealistically monumental scale, Macotela’s version puts issues of class and labor into high relief, evoking the historical relationship between colonizer and colonized while concretizing the connection between European wealth and the violent exploitation of non-European bodies in the New World and elsewhere.