Juan Covelli rebuilds Colombia’s toppled monuments

During Colombia’s 2021 national strike, protesters pulled down colonial monuments in cities across the country. Juan Covelli watched it happen from Mexico, through Instagram and the images friends kept sending—and then recruited the crowd. “I ended up asking people in Colombia, in the cities, to please go to these places and using photogrammetry tools to document the broken monuments and the empty plinths where the monuments had been,” Covelli says in a new interview with Side Quest, the research project on artist-made games whose announcement post put this one on our radar. “With the files I was sent, I rebuilt the statues from six locations.”

The result is Los Caídos (The Fallen), an open world that folds Bogotá’s Plaza de Bolívar together with landmarks from Ibagué, Barranquilla, Cali and Popayán into one impossible city. Side Quest reads it through the capriccio—the tradition of painters like Giovanni Paolo Panini compressing a city’s monuments into a single fantasy vista—a comparison Covelli, disarmingly, had never considered. What the artist did intend was a game with no way to win. “I’m not making games as a form of entertainment. They can be a type of purgatory.”

The project began as a PATH-AI commission from Somerset House with The Alan Turing Institute and UAL’s Creative Computing Institute, grew into a Premio Luis Caballero-nominated exhibition that took over Bogotá’s Espacio Odeón theater, and has since traveled to Ars Electronica and Fundació Foto Colectania in Barcelona. This June, Pérez Art Museum Miami named Covelli among the 21 recipients of its first digital art commissions. Killscreen has been near this ground before: our 2021 conversation with Leo Castañeda, another Bogotá-born artist building game worlds out of Colombian memory, makes a fine companion read.

Next comes Dreamscapes of Sand, developed from a Diriyah Art Futures residency in Saudi Arabia, about Orientalism and deserts imagined empty. Covelli’s shorthand for it doubles as a thesis: “The render is the new frontier.”