This Wednesday, the Cervantes Institute presented the new exhibition by Burgos artist Solimán López called ‘Aeolia’, a project that seeks to reimagine and rewrite passages from Don Quixote from ecological, gender or dystopian perspectives through an artificial intelligence (AI) tool.
The exhibition, framed within the new exhibition cycle ‘Intangible Landscapes’ and the new artistic and technological experimentation space of Banca Cervantes, will open this Thursday at the Institute’s Madrid headquarters and will be available to visitors until March 8, 2026.
According to a statement issued by the Institute, ‘Aeolia’ will be an “interactive installation that turns the public into a catalyst for the creative process” and its main piece is an “interactive sculpture with self-generative AI” that has been trained from the original text of Don Quixote and Cervantes’ writings, in addition to other abundant bibliography.
It is a text wind turbine that transforms the energy of the wind from the mills of Campo de Criptana (Ciudad Real) into language, inviting the public to actively participate in the creation of new stories. AI produces variations of the universal classic from ecological, gender or philosophical perspectives.
The objective has been to cover the 400 years that have passed since the publication of Don Quixote, emphasizing particular aspects and current themes that invite AI to reflect on contemporary problems such as sociology, cybernetics, sustainability, the environment, ecological transition, gender perspectives, civil disobedience, pacifism or anti-capitalist criticism.
“I wanted to question the relationship between artist and public and their intervention in creative processes and, at the same time, show a work of art without it being created by the artist,” said Solimán López during a guided tour of the exhibition. The result of this intermediation in the creative process will be five texts generated by AI, which already have a first version.
The exhibition also includes an artist’s book that houses Don Quixote 2.0 encoded in synthetic DNA, a technology that allows information to be preserved for millennia. Its structure has been designed based on the three-dimensional representation of the network of wind turbines distributed throughout the territory of Castilla-La Mancha.
In addition to these proposals, the exhibition also has another novelty, that is, an interview with Miguel de Cervantes generated with AI. This text will be available in the exhibition catalog along with the curatorial text, which also includes an interview with Solimán López.