Some history books tell us that,
during a prolonged stay in Rome, in 1805,
a young Simon Bolivar proferred a prophetic speech from the top of the Sacred Hill,
vowing to liberate America from the chains of colonial rule.
The actual circumstances of Bolivar's oath are still disputed.

Beyond the search for 'historical truth', this work concentrates on
the dramatic space and the monumental scale this narrative produces/requires to be legitimised.
The work consists in a series of formal translations of the text into
oral narrative, images, music composition, singing, libretto
and performance.

The Bolivar Hall of the Venezuelan Embassy in London
doubles the function of 'ideal dramatic space' for a live reintepretation of the oath in three voices:

*the meta-narrator who takes apart the multiple historical references as the story unfolds
* the narrator S.R. (Simon Rodriguez) who presents his project of the Respublica in the New World,
whilst presenting himself as witness and narrator of (Bolivar's) history
* the baritone singer who interprets Simon Bolivar as a lyric-literary character enclosed in the sublime landscape and restricted to 'vowing'

The music was originally composed by Greg Vamvakas,
following a 'false' baroque style to highlight the pocket-epic format of the performance.
The original text of Bolivar's oath was translated to and interpreted in French to reference the literary-political influences of the narrator Simon Rodriguez (especially Montaigne and Rousseau) and the French revolution as a political matrix
for the American independentist elite.

The scenic painting was done by Joseph Richards,
based on the official representation of Bolivar's oath by the Venezuelan academic painter Tito Salas.
I asked Jo to remove the two figures (Bolivar and Rodriguez) from the scene
and make the painting in lanscape format rather than the original portrait format.

I also went to Rome trying to find, with no success, that exact panoramic view of the painting,
from the top of either the Monte Aventino or Monte Sacro.