The video takes as its starting point the fact that Mariano Fortuny y Marsal is buried in Rome, whilst his heart was donated to his hometown, Reus. Building on this symbolic disconnect, the piece explores the artist’s life and pictorial landscapes, showing how, through the canvas, Orientalist painting produced a political and cultural fiction designed to reaffirm European identity in the face of ‘the other’, thereby legitimising European colonial projects and their overseas territorial interests.

The piece invites the viewer to question their own cultural heritage, demonstrating how the colonial imagination continues to operate in the present, infiltrating everyday gestures, national imaginaries and seemingly innocuous forms of representation. Work carried out at the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome.