My first book project delves into the tumultuous 500-year commemoration of the Discovery of America, celebrated in 1992. This grand spectacle, meticulously planned over a decade and spanning the entire year of 1992-1993, culminated in the highly mediatic Universal Exposition of Seville, known as Seville Expo '92.

To grasp the profound impact of this quincentenary event, my book charts what I term the counter-commemoration movement. This movement encompasses the provocative artworks, exhibitions, and vigorous social protests that directly challenged the official narrative of the quincentennial. By unveiling the deceptive construction of a global narrative promoted by Expo '92, the counter-commemoration movement forcefully advanced anti-colonial strategies aimed at dismantling the center-periphery paradigm, interrogating race and racism as fundamental principles of coloniality, and contesting the modern gaze that reduced the world to a mere object of representation, appropriation, and control.

In alignment with Enrique Dussel’s call for an Indigenous perspective on the commemoration, this book repositions the narrative by foregrounding the voices and arguments of the concurrent ethnic uprisings. These testimonies not only illuminated the ongoing nature of colonialism in 1992 but also revealed it as a system of visualization designed to perpetuate erasure, negation, and historical amnesia.

The book argues that the counter-commemoration movement catalyzed a transformative shift in Latin American artistic practices. By highlighting the injustices of the quincentennial, this collective resistance provided a new, potent visual language for anti-colonial activism, reshaping how artists engaged with the colonial legacy and challenging the hegemonic narratives of the time.