Exhibitions
Luis Camnitzer resurrects Simón Rodríguez to question the power of words
Es Baluard presents an exhibition that connects the emancipatory thinking of the Venezuelan educator with the conceptual practice of the artist, in a living dictionary that invites the public to rethink the relationships between language, knowledge and authority.
Language is never innocent. Words construct realities, transmit knowledge and establish power relations. This is one of the central questions that Luis Camnitzer faces. The dictionary of power, the resurrection of Simón Rodríguez , the exhibition that Es Baluard Museu d'Art Contemporani de Palma presents from November 4, 2026 to January 17, 2027, with the curatorship of Mariana Silva.
The proposal is born from the dialogue between the thought of Simón Rodríguez (Caracas, 1769 – Amotape, Peru, 1854) and the contemporary gaze of Luis Camnitzer (Lübeck, Germany, 1937), an intellectual relationship that accompanies much of the artist's career and that on this occasion acquires a new dimension. The exhibition recovers the ideas of one of the great thinkers of American emancipation to put them in contact with the questions of the present.
Educator, philosopher and writer, Rodríguez conceived of education as a fundamental tool for forming free citizens and imagining new societies. A teacher of Simón Bolívar, he developed a radical and independent thought that questioned the established structures of knowledge. His writings, aphorisms, typographical games and unique ways of organizing words turned reading into an active exercise, intended not so much to transmit information as to stimulate critical thinking.
This conception of education as an emancipatory practice connects directly with the artistic research of Luis Camnitzer, one of the essential figures of Latin American conceptual art. Artist, theorist, writer and critic, Camnitzer has developed over decades a body of work that places language, education and the construction of knowledge at the centre of artistic practice.
His interest in Simón Rodríguez dates back many years. In the Venezuelan thinker he found an interlocutor who, long before the emergence of the concept of conceptual art, was already using words, visual structures and pedagogical strategies to question conventional ways of thinking. The exhibition extends this research and transfers it to a contemporary context marked by tensions between information, authority and the production of knowledge.
The project constitutes the third collaboration between Mariana Silva and Luis Camnitzer, a complicity based on the conviction that art can become a space to formulate questions, activate thought and generate new relationships with knowledge.
In this dictionary, concepts related to education, knowledge, authority and power are presented as materials open to interpretation. The public is not conceived as a passive receiver, but as an active part of the exhibition experience. This participation is particularly concrete in The Soup of Power , an interactive station that allows visitors to incorporate their own words, ideas and concepts.
The dictionary thus becomes a collective construction that never reaches a definitive version. Each contribution modifies the whole and expands the possibilities of reading, converting individual experience into a shared process of reflection.
Rodríguez's aphorisms reappear in the exhibition space as voices that traverse time and maintain their capacity for questioning intact. Written almost two centuries ago, they continue to raise fundamental questions: what does it mean to educate? Who produces and transmits knowledge? Who has the authority to name things? What is the relationship between language and power?
Camnitzer also incorporates contemporary tools, including artificial intelligence, to establish new connections between Rodríguez's thinking and current issues. The past ceases to be a closed reality and becomes an interlocutor with whom it is still possible to dialogue.
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