Alphabet

“Be Lazy, Workers!” echoes the 2021 Colombian National Strike to reflect on the tension between work, leisure, and social control. The chairs in the installation allude to that moment when, in the face of massive protests, official government statements demanded, “Get to work, you slackers,” while much of the country—supported by the informal economy—was threatened with being told to “stop working.”

These pieces arise from the experience of navigating a ceaseless stream of images: photographs of the marches, memes, pets, recipes, and news stories recycled at breakneck speed on social media. That endless scrolling becomes, here, a gesture of contradiction: a living archive that condenses protest and consumption, pause and overexposure.

The work also ties into episodes of domestic life during academic activities amid the pandemic, when students concealed their surroundings with Zoom backgrounds supporting the protests, while university professors “kicked them out” of virtual classrooms for “disorder.” These backgrounds, designed to soften the intrusion of work and education into private life, are reconfigured as surfaces of resistance.

By inviting us to “wander,” the title subverts the productivist mandate and proposes a critical pause: a space to contemplate, to see, as a political act in the face of work’s invasion of private life.

“They/Them” explores how the mass production of images sustains the idea of the United States as a model of democracy and diversity. Even as research and facts reveal deep-rooted networks of corruption and internal conflicts, the country continues to present itself—and is perceived by much of the world—as a democratic model.

In Colombia, this projection seeps into everyday life: local companies sell beauty, food, or lifestyles using photographs from American stock image banks, reinforcing a visual colonization that dictates how the body, desire, and protest are portrayed. The internet intensifies this fictional closeness: citizens feel a connection to a country that consumes its own conflict as spectacle.

The artist appropriates a specific phenomenon: stock image and video libraries that, since 2020, have been producing scenes of racial and political protests using actors, props, makeup, and cinematic lighting. These materials, distributed without regulation, end up in news broadcasts and campaigns around the world, turning the uprising into a commodity and blurring the line between documentary and fiction.

Through artificial intelligence, voice cloning (including that of American celebrities), and meticulous frame-by-frame animation, *They/Them* makes these images “speak” about their own nature. What would a stock image say if it knew what a stock image was? The work invites us to recognize how these manufactured fragments become self-referential, revealing the economy of “outrage” that sustains everyday American life and the persistent colonization of our imagination. 

Boomerang explores the contemporary fascination with images as catalysts for identity and conflict. Inspired by Mark Fisher’s notion of “capitalist realism,” that horizon where it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, the work connects diverse cultural references: from the cinematic dystopia of *Children of Men* to Banksy’s famous mural of two police officers kissing, preserved as a relic amid the collapse.

In this scenario, the chicken—a trivial symbol of a local fast-food chain—emerges as an emblem of social media’s ability to manufacture crises of public opinion. A rumor about its alleged plagiarism in Spain is enough for the entire country to “take sides,” unleashing an avalanche of national pride, virality, and subsequent demonization. This anecdote reveals our emotional sensitivity to fleeting images that mask structural problems—and how easily this sensitivity is exploited.

Transformed into an archaeological artifact of the Colombian rebellion of the 1920s, the chicken becomes a paradoxical icon: both apolitical and anarchic, a vestige of how protest can be absorbed and neutralized by the media spectacle. Ultimately, *Boomerang* questions who owns the image of the protester and how the iconography of resistance ends up being turned into a commodity.

Alfabeto explores the arrogance of digital knowledge and the illusion of the internet as a promised land of knowledge and understanding. Far from that ideal, the web reveals itself as a hyper-commercialized and deeply American ecosystem that keeps the planet in a perpetual state of information crisis. Every news story becomes a commodity; every emergency, a product.

The work observes how even resistance movements—from anarchists organizing protests on Google Docs to activists who rely on corporate platforms—exist within a contradiction: tech capital as a stage for simultaneous anarchy and control. This tension calls into question political art itself, its social critique, and the masks it adopts to survive within the very system it denounces.

Through images, lexicons, and projections that evoke mirages, *Alfabeto* examines the propaganda that permeates our visual experience and the construction of collective imaginaries. 

Juan Obando takes no sides; he delves into the depths of the image to reveal how causes, symbols, and the sense of an eternal crisis are manufactured. The exhibition explores the construction of mirages, reflections, imaginaries, and projections that sustain a lexicon specific to our perpetual crisis.