The Speculative Treasure series presents a series of images that aim to transgress questions about repatriation, archaeology and heritage, through digital decolonial approaches.

In 1892, the Colombian President Carlos Holguín sent the Quimbaya Treasure to Madrid to exhibit it for the celebrations of the “IV Centenary of the Discovery of America” ​​and then give it to María Cristina, queen consort of Spain, in appreciation for her intervention in a territorial dispute between Colombia and Venezuela. Years later, the treasure, which includes more than a hundred objects in the form of beads, musical instruments and anthropomorphic figures made of gold and tumbaga, became part of the collection of the Museum of America in Madrid, where it is currently exhibited. In 2017, at the initiative of a popular petition and after years of legal proceedings, the Constitutional Court of Colombia decreed that the gift had been made illegally and ordered the Colombian Government to initiate procedures for its repatriation. Since then, the Museum of America and the Spanish Government have collaborated with the investigation, but have refused to return it.

The Colombian artist Juan Covelli has trained a generative adversarial network, an artificial intelligence algorithm, with images of the Quimbaya Treasure. Generative algorithms are systems designed to create synthetic images from the defining features of the photographs they are trained with. The resulting images do not reproduce any particular object, but instead produce a visual imaginary from all of them. Covelli makes use of the virtual representation of the Treasure, as a decolonial tool for the symbolic repatriation of cultural heritage.

Born in Bogota, Colombia, in 1985, Juan Covelli is an artist and independent curator who resides in the same city where he was born. He teaches at Universidad El Bosque / Universidad Javeriana and directs the online art platform Nmenos1. With a degree in Political Science from the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, a Masters in Creative Photography from Escuela Efti in Madrid and a Masters in Contemporary Photography from Central Saint Martins, Covelli’s practice uses video, modeling, data sets and coding to create works that collapse historical practices with current models of visualization and digital aesthetics. He is a recent recipient of the Lumen Moving Image Award. His work has been exhibited in cities such as Warrington, Mexico City, Bogota, Montevideo, Yekaterinburg, London, Oslo and Moscow.

Juan Covelli (Colombia, 1985)
Tesoro especulativo

2022 Edition
Indoor exhibition
Venue: Romo Kultur Etxea
Collaborator: RKE