The exhibition consists of twelve pieces that include paintings, objects, installations, videos, sound recordings and historical documents.

The works reflect two complementary and symbiotic axes of research: the study of declassified archives of the US Intelligence Services during the period 1948-1994 related to American Minimalism and the remembrance work on a group of Latin American leaders of the Cold War period, who occupied high hierarchical positions and were victims of assassinations or unsolved crimes.

En nuestra pequeña región de por acá (In Our Little Region Around Here), it’s a site-specific exhibition: the museum’s exhibition space has configured the very form of the works presented. In the first instance, a review of declassified CIA files on fourteen Latin American countries is proposed. The documents, dedicated to the recording of intelligence information and long-term political operations, are presented in a large installation that allows us to appreciate their volume and main characteristics. Many of them show erasures and censorship and, because of these graphic marks, they can no longer be considered merely as texts to be read but acquire the status of images that can be observed. The installation plays in this diffuse space between text and image.

In relation to these archives, the exhibition also problematizes the contents of American minimalist art, contrasting the austerity and formal asceticism of that movement with the political violence of the period in which it developed. Indeed, while the great political operations were taking place in Latin American territory, North American artistic and academic institutions were promoting and disseminating Minimalist abstraction as their artistic avant-garde. Thus, several quotations of Donald Judd’s works appear in the exhibition, which are materially intervened by reproductions of intelligence documents.

Thirdly, the portraits of 47 Latin American leaders (associated with their country and year of death) appear in the image of public speakers and whose deaths have not been solved or are currently being reviewed. These leaders held positions in the administration of state powers: presidents, ministers, judges, military chiefs, archbishops, deputies, senators. They are painted on bronze but are represented through a phantasmagorical effect. The question arises: When and how can the course of the history of a collective be changed? How are these operations carried out? What happens when a leader leaves his place of social representation and another one takes his place? In what directions is the collective history of our societies manipulated?

The assassinated leaders reappear in other works: images of the dead at the scene of the events or the accident projected on the positions they held, using light to make these crude images dematerialize and not morbid. In addition, there are other archival pieces in which judicial documents provided by the relatives or plaintiffs and scientific reports on the deaths present in the legal cases are collected. Finally, the unveiling of the full names appears on the veiled image of a large collective funeral. The audios of public speeches of several of these leaders are also heard.

The last element of the project is a video with the work Translation Lessons (2012-2016), a reflection on English as a hegemonic language. In it, an English professor teaches the artist the language through reading CIA files. The film highlights a powerful paradox: to understand a large part of the recent political history of Latin American countries, it is necessary to know a foreign language.