Bolivar, New York, is a pioneer oil town strangely named after the Venezuelan revolutionary who liberated five nations from the Spanish rule and dreamed of the union of the states of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. There are several coincidences between the U.S. settlement, now devastated after decades of opulence, and Bolivar’s fatherland. The most relevant is the socio-economic vestige left by the crude oil industry. This project intends to draw connections between the subcontinents. It's a reflection on U.S. conservative radicalism paralleled to Venezuela’s “socialismo mágico”, a populist-utopian belief that assures that Simón Bolívar came back to life to rescue Latin America from the claws of Yankee imperialism.
