In Cali, no one’s making art with the latest update. This city’s visual history has always run on beta mode—built with salvaged materials, blown-out sounds, cracked video games, and pixelated dreams. Its aesthetics and politics are hechizas: improvised, glitchy by design, and necessary by circumstance. In “Hechizo”, Johan Samboni (Cali, 1995) pieces together a material essay made from hand-painted bootleg covers, warped vinyl landscapes, and distorted textures of everyday life. Like a Latin-Americanized video game, the show points to a disquieting idea: what we consume as reality is often set dressing.
Hechizo—that street term for the knockoff, the defective version, the thing that wants to be but does not quite get there—becomes here an ontological category. There is no such thing as the original. Only a pile of failed copies, low-res backdrops, and narratives that never fully lock in. Incomplete simulations, not from scarcity but from overload: too many references, interference, and noise. Hechizo is not a bug you stumble on—it is a flaw baked into the operating system of the image.
From the start, Johan has worked through operations where surface and resolution are not technical problems, but political conditions. In his paintings and installations, low definition is not an aesthetic—it is the worldview from the city's east side. He does not paint with fidelity to the real; he paints from the everyday experience of living inside a loop of copies and simulations. Moreover, in that world, piracy—both as access and as shared reality—is the only channel into representation.
This is not a concept of the barrio (neighborhood) but about how it gets fabricated as fiction. An affective archive where video games, paintings, and installations function as the cultural software used to render a territory. In places where the internet is pirated and unstable, the references do not come in whole—they come as games—hacked games, glitchy ones, patched-together open worlds full of recycled NPCs. Like in GTA: San Andreas, where players modded characters and maps to write their stories, Johan constructs a visual metaphor of marginality using a tautology of images that feed off one another in a closed loop.
Each pixel is a minimal unit of representation, and by nature, a measure of scarcity. It is the minimum needed to give shape to something—just enough to register, never sufficient to flesh it out. That incomplete render defines how certain bodies and geographies have been portrayed historically: low-data, out of context, viewed from a distance. In “Hechizo”, the materials of urban self-construction—corrugated roofing, concrete, tin scraps, leftover paint—act like physical pixels: fragments that hold up a precarious stage for desire. There is no illusion of completeness. However, there is patchwork. There is invention.
This whole proposition plugs into debates around post-Internet aesthetics, where the logic of navigation, interface, and information overload shape how images are produced and inhabited. In this world, there is no depth—only shifting surface. Everything plays out on fictional skin. Everything is set. But that is precisely where the politics of representation unfold. Thinking through that surface means sketching out a kind of power map. Because Johan Samboni understands that the image of the marginal does not always come from the margins—it is projected from the center, which needs it as a backdrop to prop up its fantasy of control.
Ana Cárdenas
