This series of works are inspired by the myth of the king Midas. It’s been exciting and frightening at the same time to revisit this mythological figure. His tragical story is so present nowadays – maybe even more than ever before. Despite his wealth, the King of Phrygia used the wish that Dionisio offered him to ask for the power of transforming everything he touched into gold. At the beginning he was so fascinated that he jumped around touching stones and flowers and transforming them into little golden sculptures. Nevertheless, as soon as he got hungry and the food and wine became gold as well, he realized he had condemned himself to starvation and death.

Sometimes I feel sorry for Midas. I feel sorry for seeing him in that very silly position and then I get very anxious to see how all of us, to a greater or lesser extent, suffer from what I would like to call the Midas Syndrome – specially up here in the north. We are so obsessed with wealth and power that we are destroying precisely what matters the most; we are drying up the earth and wiping out all other forms of life and ways of being in the world that don’t fit within the capitalistic machine. If I had a wish, I would like to ask for some infallible treatment against the world’s Midas syndrome.

This ongoing body of work plays with the idea of diagnosing this dangerous syndrome and imagining possible treatments against it. The question of how to interrupt through fiction the viscous circles of extractivism and death in which we are trapped in our contemporary societies, inventing new narratives and characters (like the gold itself that gets an own voice to protest), has guided the making of these works and connected me with the tradition of Guamán Poma. The brilliant Inka artist and chronicler from the16th century saw in the European conqueror the incarnation of a gold-devouring machine, predicting through his drawings the Midas Syndrome that nowadays is taking us to the stage of extinction.