Villa del Rosario is the old Colombian capital where Bolívar was named president of the Great Colombia (Venezuela, Colombia and Panama) in 1821 and where the Republican Congress first held session. Today, only an edifice in ruins remains, as a reminder of the fact that the Panamerican union never came to fruition. It was in this same spot where I patiently waited for a whole week for the sister Bolivarian country of Venezuela to open the doors to my van and me. The requirements for my entry had arrived to the most ludicrous stage, and the only thing left was now to ask for a personal letter by president Chávez himself. On Friday, the customs office closed at 4:30pm and the Vice-minister had not yet signed the letter.
I sat idly and anxiously in this part of the world, in the only small hotel of the town that ironically faces the ruined palace that embodied the Bolivarian dream of unity. Like that structure, and like that dream, my utopian journey apparently had arrived to a similar fate. That week I had been victim of theft, had a car accident, and my spirits were in their lowest level. As it was customary to submit an address at each location visited, I wrote The Panamerican Address of Villa del Rosario.
“(…) The Colombia that I found, either in reality or in imagination, is a country with open wounds. My conversations, maybe imaginary, with curators, critics and educators, went gently around the topic of national patrimony. And yet the following workshop (that I believe I gave) inevitably derived into the hateful and tired, but unavoidable topic of the civil war and the drug traffic, the very own unrest of this country (…) In the end, the search for the project is and has been for our collective and individual unrests, and in the Colombia that I visited I found them, thought to have lived them, and think that at least I was able to conceive the challenge that it represents to face them daily.”
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Villa del Rosario es la vieja capital colombiana donde Bolívar fue nombrado presidente de la Gran Colombia (la unión de Venezuela, Colombia y Panamá) en 1821, y donde el nuevo congreso republicano fue proclamado. Hoy en día, el día donde se firmó aquella proclamación yace en ruinas, al igual que aquél proyecto integracionista. Fue en este mismo lugar donde he esperado por una semana a que la República Bolivariana de Venezuela me permita entrar al país. Cada día me imponen nuevos requisitos, incluyendo una carta del vice-ministro de relaciones exteriors. He estado sentado ansiosamente en esa parte del mundo, en el único hotel del pueblo que irónicamente se encuentra justo enfrente de esta ruina bolivariana. Como ese edificio, y como aquél sueño de unificación, siento que mi proyecto ha llegado a un destino similar.