In her work for the 5th Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art, Ekaterinburg (RU), Martínez Garay’s multi-media video installation “Y no podránmatarlo... / And they could never kill him…”(2019) features the Peruvian actor Reynaldo Arenas, a cultural icon known for his portrayals of Incan characters such as El Gran Inca and The LastInca. The video is simultaneously biographical and fictional, historical and futuristic, assembling media such as footage of him reenacting his role as Túpac Amaru II (a mythologized historical figure who led a large Andean uprising against Spanish colonists), found footage of his past performances, dialogues between Arenas and Martínez Garay about his career, as well as CGI scenes performed by a 3D model of Arenas.
The work not only explores the tensions between history and myth, the endemic and the foreign, but also those between technological and cultural immortalities. This video installation underlines the nuanced relationship between technology and the cultural past: through modern recording technologies, CGI, and digital archiving, the past is rendered immortal. Yet, technology can also function as an instrument of colonization, facilitating myth-making and perversion of truth with the result of commercialising a culture.