Prodrome

Abstract

Ilich Castillo’s exhibition PRÓDROMO takes as its starting point Cómo se encienden los discursos populares, según Homs (2005), a work presented twenty years earlier at the Salón de Julio in Guayaquil and based on the model for the monument commemorating the meeting between Bolívar and San Martín. From this reference, the project critically revisits historical commemoration, popular culture, masculinity, power, and Latin American imaginaries. The exhibition dialogues with Samuel Robinson and Simón Rodríguez, Bolívar’s teachers, utopian thinkers, and inventors situated at the margins of power. Through the reuse of encyclopedias, facsimiles, candles, precarious structures, domestic objects, and lighting devices, Castillo proposes a polyphonic reading of history’s remains, the unfinished promises of education, and regional narratives. PRÓDROMO moves between archive, ruin, caricature, and the critical possibility of invention.