Leticia Obeid

Dictations
Filmed on a train ride from the center of Buenos Aires to the suburbs, the video documents the action of manually copying the “Letter of Jamaica” by Simon Bolivar, a document dating from 1815 and developing the Venezuelan´s political philosophy in the form a diagnosis and prognosis for Latin America. The tour shows the different urban, social and economic landscapes of the city of Buenos Aires and its suburbs, to rethink the ideas in this text and compare them to the present and to introduce the problem of translation between these ideas and practice. Being that a text in which Bolívar raises the possibility of turning the Spanish colonies into republics – a text written in the midst of the wars for Independence, a piece that is as much the result of careful observation and speculative thinking, as the movement itself, ie, is thought and action at a time – the idea for this video was to contrast the slowness of writing with the speed of travel, making manual copying text a way of foot traffic in the action, appropriating the words while the environment is changing.