Humanity has been wiped out

and four robots are the only survivors of the apocalypse.

This is the premise of La Mujer y el Robot (The Woman and The Robot) a text that Guatemalan writer Miguel Marsicovétere published in 1938, an early work of Latin American science fiction, which looked ahead of its time into ideas that were going to be explored by mainstream sci-fi only decades later.

This 1938 text (a theater playwright) became the starting point for artist Oscar Santillán and filmmaker Elimo Eliseo. Their collaboration went into transforming the original energy into an audiovisual work.

The resulting video-work revisits Marsicovétere’s central questions about machine consciousness and ecological collapse. At the same time, the new version moves away from the original’s metaphysical tone, embracing instead the language of B-movies and low-budget entertainment.

The project began in 2019, when Oscar was commissioned to create a new work for the Paiz Biennial. After discovering this text, long forgotten by the literary canon, he invited Eliseo, known in rural Guatemala for his homemade action films, to reinterpret it together through the lens of unapologetic Latin American sci-fi.

The Woman and The Robot (fragment), 2021-2024. HD video, 28 min, stereo sound.
A work by Oscar Santillán and Elimo Eliseo, with sound-compositions by Paola Torres and Oído.