the 11th of September ;we present «El Sueño Bolivariano. Preludio I», the exhibition with which we open this season and we participate Apertura Madrid Gallery Weekend 2025BOLIVAR’S DREAM AND NIGHTMAREOctavio ZayaBOLIVARIAN DREAM is a progressive, ongoing project that, according to itsauthor—the Peruvian artist José Carlos Martinat—will follow the route traced by the“Liberator of the Americas” Simón Bolívar during his campaigns of independence(1813–1824). What is presented now is only a provisional first installment of the projectand includes Peru and Venezuela among the six nations of Bolívar’s independencemovement, which also comprise Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Panama (the latterjoined voluntarily and peacefully in Bolívar’s project of Gran Colombia while the finalgreat battles were being fought in South America). JC Martinat’s wish is “to also work incountries where the Bolivarian breezes have reached: Cuba, Haiti, Chile, and Argentina,with leaders who have upheld Bolivarianism.”*The project’s overall aim is to “extract” political slogans and graffiti from the walls ofmajor Latin American cities, “capturing the sentiments both of those who are in and withthe government, and of those who yearn for power.”* These street extractions seek toestablish a visual X-ray—specifically, a high-contrast image of political discoursesupposedly free of institutional mediation or interests—of the six Latin Americancountries mentioned above today. Through this “archaeological, anthropological, andsociological record, BOLIVARIAN DREAM wants to take the pulse”* of the complex andcrisis-ridden realities that oscillate between facts and fictions, hopes and despair,ideological slogans and popular demands.For this first partial presentation in Madrid, in addition to some of the extractions alreadycarried out in Peru and Venezuela—including images of Bolívar, Fujimori, and Chávez’seyes—Martinat includes an installation that complements these images: a series ofthermal printers connected to a computer with software that searches for interrelatedinformation on the web about the selected countries—in this case, Venezuela and Peru.The responses are printed on papers that scatter and mix in the space. The artistpresented this same type of technological installation in Environments of Stereo Reality,a performative work that was part of Next Stop, an exhibition of Peruvian artists Iorganized for Alcalá 31 in Madrid in 2017. The contrast between political expression inthe streets and technological mediation via the internet (with biased algorithms, fakenews, and commercial manipulation) at the very least reflects the realities of dominantdiscourses and marginal expressions, and surely also reveals the general mismatchbetween global and local interests.In Latin America, the slogans and announcements of organizations such as unions,professional associations, and citizens—as well as pro- and anti-government politicalpropaganda—have been a fundamental form of social and political expression on citywalls, becoming an extension of popular and institutional voices in public spaces (today,social media walls also serve this role). In response to this phenomenon, José CarlosMartinat has developed a body of work that appropriates these political manifestationsthrough techniques of extraction, archiving, and critical recontextualization. Far frompassively reproducing these urban manifestations, Martinat turns them into tools forexamining mechanisms of power, collective memory, and the tensions between theinstitutional and the marginal, continuing his reflection on themes related to politics,urbanism, memory, and popular visual culture.Martinat developed a specific technique to physically remove layers of posters, graffiti,and mural paintings from the walls of Lima and other cities, transferring them to canvasor portable structures. This process preserves not only the aesthetics of urban politicalexpressions, but also their texture, deterioration, and the marks of time. Thisappropriation in Martinat’s work is not a simple reproduction, but a critical operation thatpushes the boundaries between public and private, legitimate and subversive. The actof transferring a fleeting political message into the art space is not innocent: it implies atransformation of the original meaning, while preserving its historical and visual weight.Through it, Martinat proposes a reflection on the city’s visual languages, power, andcollective memory. As Liernur points out, “the street and its surfaces are not neutral, butspaces contested by different memories and powers.”This operation by Martinat can be understood as an act of urban archaeology. Insteadof creating new images, the artist excavates the textual and visual strata of the city torescue traces of discourses constantly subjected to whitewashing, censorship, orerasure. The political messages and propaganda of the streets, often consideredmarginal or temporary, are re-signified in his works as both document and symptom. Inthis way, Martinat activates an archival mechanism that circulates messages that powerwould prefer to forget or suppress. Moreover, his work raises a profound critique of therelationships between the popular and the institutional, the spontaneous and theregulated, the ephemeral and the permanent. By decontextualizing a protest graffiti orpropaganda poster and relocating it into the space of galleries and museums, Martinatquestions the boundaries of artistic legitimacy and highlights how certain visualdiscourses only gain symbolic value once co-opted by art institutions. His work thusexposes how easily the languages of resistance can be absorbed by the culturalmarket, neutralizing their original potential.Martinat’s appropriation of these discourses and images is also rooted in a specificallyLatin American context, where the wall has a key political function: it is the primemedium for popular expression, social denunciation, and collective memory. In countrieslike Peru and Venezuela, marked by decades of political violence, inequality, andterritorial conflict, walls inform, shout, and protest. By recording and re-appropriatingthese mural voices, Martinat preserves them and subjects them to new critical readings.Meanwhile, Bolívar’s dream—to unite all of South America’s former Spanish coloniesinto a single large and powerful nation, a confederation, Gran Colombia, which inessence would have been a continental Latin American power comparable to the UnitedStates—not only failed. Bolívar’s misfortune was that before dying he witnessed hisdream collapse. The reasons are many, and this is a topic for another occasion, but hisdisillusionment is reflected in some of his last words: “I have plowed the sea and sownthe wind.” Nevertheless, although his dream of continental political union did not cometrue, his legacy as a liberator is unquestionable, even if some authors question hisalliances with elites and the fact that Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants, andmestizos remained subordinated after independence. In any case, his vision of LatinAmerican integration—however false it may seem—remains an ideal and a point ofreference to this day.In contrast to that dream of unity and freedom, of stability and strength, of integrationand cooperation, the reality that Martinat engages with is instead characterized by acrisis of representation and widespread institutional distrust, political personalizationand caudillismo, weak party systems, territorial and social divisions, populism as amode of political communication, judicialization and use of the state apparatus as apolitical weapon, continuous or recurring social mobilization, economic crises and socialinequalities, the destabilizing impact of U.S. support or sanctions, theinstrumentalization of the “Venezuela model” as a constant specter in political debates,and a political language of permanent confrontation.Faced with this situation, I fear that José Carlos Martinat’s ongoing project will show usabove all BOLÍVAR’S NIGHTMARE.* Asterisks throughout the text indicate statements by the artist