Lucio

The tenth edition of the SURVIVAL Art Review had its ever-burning flame – just like the Olympics. It was Aleka Polis’s work under the title Lucio – after the famous forger Lucio Urtubia, who in the 1970s used counterfeited Citibank travellers’ checks to deplete their funds by around 50 million dollars. He used the money to finance the fight against regimes of that time, in particular in South America. This aspect of Urtubia’s activities prompted the artist to create a fictitious movement called ‘anarchotricksterism’ – whose general description accompanied the work – and to compare him with the mythical Prometheus, who stole gods’ fire from the Olympus to bring it to people. Urtubia’s fire was burning in a light whose shape replicated the profile of this contemporary hero, as the artist perceives it – who ‘carried the light’ in the darkness of predatory economy and unclear politics that surrounds it, sustaining local and global inequalities and injustices.

> Michał Bieniek

fot. Peter Kreibich