GROUNDING

La Bestia is one of Roberto Arámbula’s most expansive projects — a work that maps the fractures of the present: forced migration, social control, consumer fetishism, and economic violence. Far from being a manifesto, his practice embodies an aesthetic of friction, where image and ethics merge with intensity.

The project’s title refers to the freight train that crosses Mexico northward, but in Arámbula’s symbolic universe, La Bestia also signifies collective bodies, transit, and resistance. At the same time, it evokes the figure of the devil in Latin American imagination — not as an entity, but as a metaphor for capital when it manifests through structures that exert economic violence upon the most vulnerable.

Painting, installation, performance, and video compose the phases of this expanded work. Each can stand on its own, but it is through their totality that a more intricate critique of the systems shaping our experience emerges.

Works like Dollar of Ignorance (Hamburg, G20, 2017) — in which thousands of fictional banknotes were thrown into a crowd — show how Arámbula’s art breaks through the boundaries of art spaces and into the real: into the street, into bodies, into the symbolic economy of power.

La Bestia does not offer easy answers. It confronts, interrogates, and reveals what is usually avoided. Arámbula does not beautify the world; he renders it inescapable.