Los caídos [The Fallen]
Los caídos [The Fallen] by Juan Covelli is a comprehensive multimedia installation spanning four floors of the Espacio Odeón, exploring polarities like ruin and regeneration, and virtuality and materiality. Ruin is presented as a political statement resulting from collective iconoclasm (like the 2019-2021 social uprisings in Colombia), evidenced by debris, a digital totem of the defunct Los Héroes monument, and a suspended earth sculpture. These ruins reflect the obsolescence of historical grandiloquence.
Memory is depicted as fragmented and malleable due to algorithmic "echo chambers" and the rise of Artificial Intelligence, which challenges the construction of a homogeneous truth. A sand pedestal interacts with a visual essay co-created with AIs to question the reliability of images and the possibility of collective idols in the post-truth era. As an alternative to monumentality, the canon must be malleable and horizontal. A video game serves as the centerpiece, proposing a cathartic, speculative space where characters like Captain Colombia, the ESMAD, a Misak Indigenous person, or a trans person consolidate as new identity benchmarks. Finally, regeneration follows ruin, where earth sculptures incorporating mycelium consume the fallen forms of the past to incubate new multispecies futures.