Marco Bell

Bolivar, New York, is a pioneer oil town curiously named after the Venezuelan revolutionary who liberated five nations from Spanish rule and envisioned a union of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. Striking parallels exist between this now-devastated U.S. settlement—once thriving in oil-fueled opulence—and Bolívar’s homeland. Among them is the socio-economic legacy left by the oil industry.

This project blends documentary photography with socially engaged performance to examine shared histories of extractivism, ideology, and myth. At its core is the creation of an imagined Plaza Bolívar—a symbolic reinterpretation of the iconic civic squares found in nearly every Venezuelan and Colombian town. Traditionally, these plazas are public spaces of gathering, protest, leisure, and memory—anchored by a statue of Simón Bolívar. In Bolivar, New York, I performed the idea of such a plaza by relocating a bust of Bolívar throughout the town, temporarily transforming mundane spaces into sites of reflection and dialogue.

In one of the project’s key gestures, I took an analog portraits of the bust alongside several local residents, then buried the film negative in a nearby oil field for several days. This act ritualizes the entanglement of history, labor, and land—embedding the image into the very soil once mined for value and now heavy with forgotten legacies.

The project draws connections between the two Americas, reflecting on U.S. conservative radicalism in parallel with Venezuela’s socialismo mágico—a populist, utopian belief that imagines Bolívar resurrected to free Latin America from the grip of Yankee imperialism.