When you think about the notion of lasting, some questions arise ¿what should last? ¿What are the conditions for an event, a person, a story, an idea, a culture to be enduring? ¿What is worthy of being immortalized and how is it immortalized? These ideas are at the heart of the research and artistic production of Jorge Marín, in which he questions hegemonic historical legacies and highlights the absurdity of the assimilation of foreign legacies in the consolidation and construction of a sovereign state. These serve to demonstrate the failure of such totalizing gestures.

'Gestos de gestas' is a project in which Marín has been reviewing forms of pictorial and sculptural representation -based on European canons- of heroes and notables of the 19th and early 20th centuries. From the detailed study of these iconographies, the artist uses fragmentation, disappearance, ashes, glazes, studs, silhouettes, and artificial intelligence, as plastic strategies in which he seeks to narrate the partial or total loss of aura in these elements of national representation.

In the artist own words, the textual resource is an essential part of his aesthetic proposal; “The project analyzes the role that the written word has had in the construction of a national historical memory, its power and hegemony from the discourse, the story or the public location, erasing or whitewashing other stories and prioritizing History over other stories, shaping the ideals and beliefs of an era and helping in the construction of ideals and governmental norms. The overlapping of texts, the visibility of other discourses and the intervention of editorial material are gestures that reflect on what has been silenced.”