Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Martín Sastre, Self-taught

Born in the British Hospital in Montevideo, on a Friday, February 13, 1976, at 1:00 p.m., under the sign of Aquarius with Gemini rising, Dragon in the Chinese zodiac. He is the oldest of three, and currently lives in Spain.

Cinema came into existence around 1885 and, virtually at the same time, some weird films started being viewed, which were later labeled “experimental cinema.” Deeply linked to literature, more specifically to poetry, we had our Uruguayan examples in Pupila al viento (1949), by Enrico Gras and Danilo Trelles, featuring Rafael Alberti reciting his poem in the soundtrack. Then there was Largo pétalo, by the architect Alberto Mántaras, made in 1958 featuring Pablo Neruda both on and off screen. Cinema remained scarce in Uruguay until the advent of video, in the mid-1980s, and along with it, many changes took place.

That which had been “experimental” became “video art,” and then “art.” Always attached to other arts, as if asking for permission. Some of the work by Hugo Ulibe and Guillermo Casanova gave way to a group of artists, who were closer to the visual arts, including dance, and who founded Nuva - Núcleo Uruguayo de Videoarte, in the second half of the 1970s. Some of the artists who stood out in that group were Fernando Alvarez Cozzi and Enrique Aguerre.

Those young creators freed themselves from the chains of all previous trends, and inaugurated a creative, original body of work, giving rise to a true artistic movement, one that had autonomy and rigueur in the use of audiovisual language.

The offspring of Nuva includes Paula Delgado, Dani Umpi, and Martín Sastre. The latter got started as a child, in the cinema for children courses that Eloy Yerle would organize at the Cinemateca Uruguaya. Later on, he made drawing, sculptures, and attended an architecture school...

In 1999, the Alliance Française in Montevideo asked him to organize an installation for an exhibition in video creation. He got a job working at the gallery in the Alliance, and from there he issued a press release announcing that, due to the death of “Robert Quenedit,” “Jaquelín Quenedit” would arrive in Uruguay as part of a world tour to exorcize the family’s curse. He managed to get some journalists to request interviews with someone that would never arrive, since she had passed away years earlier.

After that media intervention, he obtained a scholarship in France, and upon returning to his country, he thoroughly dedicated himself to audiovisual creation, which led him to make videos in the beginning of the century. In the year 2000 he presented The E! True Hollywood Story and Heidiboy, and at the same time he had an exhibition in New York entitled Big, quisiera ser grande, which attracted attention due to his originality and skill, especially given the fact that he came from a country as ‘grey’ and conservative as Uruguay.

The video is a fake documentary film in which the author is the interviewee, and ends up revealing himself as an artist who rises up from his people’s poverty to reach Hollywood stardom. It is a sort of ironic take on his own story, in which the artist pushes the boundaries, and turns the story into a quasi-comedy.

In the following year, he made Masturbated Virgin I, Masturbated Virgin II, Sor Kitty: The Missionary Nun. Sastre started using the icons of our days, of our beloved consumer society, in this particular case, Britney Spears, who was then living the drama of her virginity. Once again, the artist is featured in the first person, by now already converted into a hero, a sort of apostle, or a domestic Superman capable of saving his heroine. Devoid of sophisticated resources, he runs around the streets holding a giant swab.

Very much influenced by pop, the artist’s visual approach is unscrupulous. Using scant technological supports, he recreates a world of fantasy using data taken from reality. And he confronts us with the other side of that reality, so fickle and cruel that it reminds us of Andy Warhol’s Factory, even though in the case of Sastre, the stars themselves appear on the screen.

Humor is the key for inserting the scalpel into his stories. They manage to obtain immediate complicity from the audience, which becomes part of this world filled with color and visual ideas.

Around that time, the artist arrives in Madrid, through a scholarship granted by Fundación Carolina. There, he made La Trilogía Iberoamericana, comprised of Videoart: The Iberoamerican Legend; Montevideo: The Dark Side of the Pop; and Bolivia 3: Confederation Next. Already converted into Walt Sastre, he entered a time tunnel to create a lesson on video art in the Iberian America, in a sort of epic crusade never before witnessed.

A story of success, in which Hollywood is replaced with the bothersome hyperrealism of the means of communication. In a deeply kitsch taste, characters parade such as Carmen Miranda, Kurt Cobain, George Bush, CNN, Ho Chi Minh, and Martín Sastre himself, turned into a star in the likes of Tom Cruise or Richard Gere in their heyday.

In Latin America, secrets and lies define his story. The most prominent representatives of the European Intelligence Center are sent over to investigate, in Montevideo, the secret of Martín Sastre’s success. The young experts discover a deserted city, and Sastre singing karaoke in the streets. A retrofuturistic story of inverted colonialism, featuring a South American backyard and European financing. The work won the artist Madrid’s ARCO award, at a tender twenty-eight years of age.

Bolivia 3 presents a duel between Martín Sastre, a representative of Iberian-American Art, and Matthew Barney, a member of North American Art. The confrontation is a metaphor for the inequality between opponents, similar to some David and Goliath who will not quit fighting. In Madrid, Sastre hosted a TV show featuring interviews and performance actions, which in turn would take the TV scheme to artistic territories. “I am interested in expanding the limits, working on them, and dissolving them. I do not accept for art to be restricted, while all other things expand,” he says.

And irony takes over our artist. Perhaps from the perspective of the old Europe, he creates what he baptized The Martín Sastre Foundation for the Super Poor Art, exhorting 21st-century Maecenas to adopt Latin American artists, once again portraying himself as the main character in a world that worships characters out of whim, and not for their talent.

Let us suppose that the crisis of values of the 20th century has ended, and the Bible is no longer placed by the heater, as goes the Argentine tango Cambalache. Now, the game is a different one: if you please me, I buy. The Foundation’s Web site is so attractive, so refined, so suggestive, that it barely reveals the intense irony of its contents. It is more seducing than it is commanding, because it has the reason of the brave, of those pure heroes of the 1940s movies.

Sastre then featured in important exhibitions, from the Palais de Tokyo, in Paris, with his work Playlist, to the 26th Bienal de São Paulo, in which he represented Uruguay. And then Dublin, New York, Edinburgh, Geneva, Sydney, Genoa, Shanghai got to know a series of works that remain unseen in his native country.

International recognition is always bigger than domestic recognition; this applies to all Uruguayan artists, and it is a rule that does not change with time. The fact is, there is no right or left wing when it comes to the treatment dispensed to art in a “little country” such as ours.

The year 2005 saw the debut of Diana: The Rose Conspiracy, during the Venice Biennale, a fiction work in which he claims to have discovered that Lady Di did not die under the Pont d’Alma in Paris, but that she is alive and hiding in a neighborhood in the outskirts of Montevideo. A secret sisterhood of nuns then decides to rescue Diana of Wales, their most important member.

She does not speak, but is seen carrying shopping bags in the streets of an impoverished neighborhood, and eating churros with a younger boyfriend. Simultaneously, we see archival footage broadcast by international news agencies, upon finding out that the princess did not die. In the words of the author, similar to Sleeping Beauty or Snow White, Diana had to escape her enemies, just like fairy tale princesses hid from villains and would end up in huts lost in the woods…

In that same year, The Martín Sastre Foundation granted a scholarship to Charlotte Seidel, Susi Pietsch, and Annemarie Thiede, three German artists from the Bauhaus School in Weimar, for them to live in Montevideo under the programme Be a Latin American Artist, created by the Foundation.

Martín Sastre’s creativity seems boundless, and his challenge is showing that there is still strength in the Latin American continent, that there are more wills than there are possibilities, even though his character does what he can to get what he wants. And that is how he arrives in England, in 2006, by means of a scholarship granted by the Site Gallery, in Sheffield, to carry out the Freaky Birthday project, inspired by the Hollywood movie Freaky Friday, in which a young woman wants to take over her mother’s body, to understand how the world is viewed from the perspective of another person. And Sastre discovers that he was born on the same day as Robbie Williams. A dream becomes reality as Sastre earns fame and success living inside Robbie’s skin, with the eyes of a Latin American artist.

His relation with the “real world” has many edges. For instance, his work with Spanish electropop group Fangoria (La mano en el fuego), his collaboration with actor Nacho Vidal, and the men’s wear brand EBP, as well as many videos in YouTube, and a long list of et ceteras.

Sastre is not alien to contemporary myths. From Britney Spears to Paris Hilton, those myths comprise a discourse that allows him to ironize this world in which we are supposed to live. Globalization is always a feature in his work, from the objects in his drawings to fragments of films, documentaries, fiction, or animation. His work creates a postindustrial world where nothing signifies what it really is, if not inserted into a context. Dreams come true easily, as do fame, the possibility of becoming a star, or the possibility of becoming a Latin American artist, that is, poor. Pop, in his work, is a way of seeing the world, of going beyond appearances, of composing a space-time that is close to fantasy, this fantasy that invades us coming from screens all the time, distinct from the reality of newscasts.

“Uruguay is a small territory that does not have much of a deep-rooted culture of its own. It is a crossing place between Latin America as a geographic location, the contribution of the majoritarian European immigration, and the strong invasion of United States culture,” as Sastre put it.

It is not by chance that Sastre lives in Almodóvar’s home country. It is not by chance either that his source of inspiration is still the South, Montevideo, his homeland, which kicks him out, yet supplies him with so many themes to enact. Perhaps this boy who learned to decode images from Eloy Yerle is seeking a myth in which to believe, after realizing that fame is a mere fairy tale, having fun as a protagonist, a hero in a human comedy that is built up day by day, as he proceeds in his quest.

The fact is that we, Uruguayans, are so serious that we need room to take off the mask of transcendence, and start appreciating the humor of Sastre, he who fights against the empire, who bares the secrets of myths (living and dead), modest with pride, who sings and dances like the great artists, and who brings us closer to a universe in which everything is possible. And if there is no money, he will do it anyway, because Sastre is a genius.

“The devastating recording of reality by news networks (where the reality perceived is at the same time detached, ‘produced,’ and occasionally generated by the means of communication) is merely the first sign of a cataclysm of huge proportions that discloses the advancement of the real into fantasy. And terror and chaos came with the advent of the Bush era, when wars broadcast live on our TV screens and the ubiquity of surveillance cameras have produced effects of reality so powerful that they ruined Hollywood, the great factory of dreams,” says the artist.

We all are Gardel, we all are Martín Sastre!

Thank you, Martín.

A curator and a filmmaker, Ricardo Casas (Montevideo, 1955) established, in Uruguay, the Divercine - International Film Festival for Children and Youth, and the Iman – Instituto de Medios Audiovisuales para Niños y Jóvenes, and wrote, along with Graciela Dacosta, the book Diez Años de Video Uruguayo, 1995. His Palabras Verdaderas, 2004, about Mario Benedetti, was awarded best Latin American documentary film at the Lleida Festival (Spain). In 2000, he assumed the vice-presidency at ASOPROD – the Uruguayan Association of Cinema and Video Makers and Producers, which reelected him in 2005. He is a member of the Commission of Directors at the Cinemateca Uruguaya.

In The E! True Hollywood Story, you tell the story of your life in a format commonly used in biographies of international pop icons. This can be regarded as a good-humored translation of this Dossier’s postulate: I look, therefore I am. In your case, that means reinventing yourself and being absorbed by the global mass culture. Is everything we see on a screen a construction? 

Films as a whole—especially fiction films—consist of thousands, millions of dollars and the effort of hundreds of people with a single goal: to lie. It is a convention, we all know that what we will see in a film is a lie. Thus, it is not an evil lie, it is simply a lie that we want to believe, and one that we need, by the way. A documentary film is the same thing: behind it there lies a filmmaker who is not unbiased. Ever since I was a child, whenever I would watch a TV contest, I would say to my sister: “That is a setup.” And until this day she laughs at me because of that, because I have always been paranoid (laughs). But I think that it was precisely that precocious paranoia that saved me from being a silly, passive viewer. More than paranoia, it is a sensation inherent in everything I see on a screen, a sort of sixth sense for tricks that I was born with—be that good or bad. There is always an eye that looks at one side more than the other, an eye that builds. My The E! True Hollywood Story—from a restricted vantage point—is absolutely real. All of the things that are told actually happened to me: I drank gasoline when I was two, I drew the Pope because I believed that John Paul II was a member of the band Kiss, etc. And all of the characters that appear are real, in real situations. It is almost a documentary film. The construction aspect of it lies in the fact that I told my own story as if the E! Entertainment Television channel was telling it. I have watched approximately thirty episodes, and I noticed that the biographies of different people would become more and more similar to each other, they all had had a traumatizing event in their childhood, they all had had a point of inflexion between being anonymous and becoming a star. Nowadays, the construction of a star is standardized too, and The E! True Hollywood Story tells the story of my life abiding by that process. In terms of linear interpretation, all of that is real.     To appear and to exist are two very distinct things. First of all, this work existed on a concrete level—my story—, and then it appeared—a TV show. The process is the polar opposite of the curatorial guideline.

Did you receive any comment or reply from Matthew Barney regarding his “special appearance” in Bolivia 3? Why did you choose Barney?

Matthew Barney is the most successful video artist in the generation that immediately preceded mine, the one that came up in the 1990s. And as the British art critic Tom Morton put it, my struggle with him is the battle of Luke Skywalker with his father, Darth Vader, when he tells him: “Luke... I’m your father... Come to the dark side...” That reference had never crossed my mind when I made Bolivia 3: Confederation Next, but it seemed very valid to me. One must fight that which is already established, and Matthew Barney represents the large budgets of United States-based art, something that makes my fight against him more similar to that of David against Goliath, two characters whose different sizes are similar to those of Uruguay and the United States, a giant cultural superpower like few in History, and a small country devoid of any strong or clear-cut cultural policies. It took me a long time to come up with a conclusion for that conflict, to decide whether Barney should or should not die in the end. Nevertheless, instead of making a violent ending, I chose to turn him into Barney, the Dinosaur, an affectionate being. I chose to take him to another territory where, at last, we could be friends. In every premier of the trilogy, strange things happened to me. When I premiered Bolivia 3 representing Uruguay in the Bienal de São Paulo, to my surprise, Matthew Barney showed up to watch it. When he left, he was very moved, he bowed down to me and hugged me, laughing. Effectively, the real Barney and the one featured in the video had turned into emotional beings, in the end. In front of me, no longer stood the Matthew Barney superstar of Current Art, Björk’s husband, etc., but rather a colleague who was laughing along with me. Then, I was happy about having opted for that ending, that was another proof that whoever dominates fiction dominates reality. Art is transforming, that is what is good about it. 

You are clearly interested in many different sectors of pop culture, from Gone with the Wind to Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Star Wars, Matrix, or Interview with the Vampire. What is the importance of cinema to your background?

“Sectors of pop culture” is a great title for something! I was brought up during the expansion of video rental shops, at eleven years of age I had already watched all the films in my neighborhood rental, and then I switched to other rentals. When I had already enrolled in all of the nearby rental shops, then I started watching the same films over and over again. What I was interested in was watching, and that was how I spent my childhood, puberty, and half my adolescence: watching movies at home. In the Cold War period, as Margaret Thatcher put it when Ronald Reagan died: “President Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot, without launching a missile...” To that I would add: “He won the war with movies.” It was not by chance that, being a product of Hollywood, he fostered the propagation of a cheap, effective type of film which, by means of the VHS, reached the entire world. Parallel to that, the first thing I ever studied in my life, besides going to school, was cinema. I enrolled in an experimental school for children established by the Montevideo Cinémathèque after the end of the military regime, and it was a very rich experience, which left a deep impression on me. I would go with my sister every Saturday to an old building downtown, and there, along with the other children, we would create stories and then shoot them, we did animation films. I believe that there I learned all of the foundations of audiovisual. My story is exactly the same as that of Britney Spears or Robbie Williams. Behind it all, there was a visionary mother dreaming of having a famous child (laughs)... I like all of the movies that you mentioned. Maybe I like Interview with the Vampire even more, because it represents that romantic—almost gothic—side of my grunge adolescence in Montevideo, in the 1990s. ... And Gone with the Wind has always appealed a lot to me, there are references to that film in many of my works. I have always felt a bit like Scarlett O’Hara, fighting adversity in a Montevideo devastated and emptied—as was the rest of Latin America—by military and democratic regimes imposed by foreign powers. There is a moment in which I specially identify myself with Scarlett, which is when she rips off the curtains left over from the time when the family used to have money, to fetch the money that will save Tara, the homeland to her family, the place that represents her comfortable childhood when there were no wars. For Masturbated Virgin, I had some clothes made out of my grandmother’s curtains so I would go to New York. The important thing is to understand that Scarlett might have been wearing curtains, but you can be certain that those were not just any curtains, those were very high-end curtains. 

Why is Hello Kitty a symbol of the “almighty power of pop” to you?
Because she has no mouth. Hello Kitty is the Monalisa of the future. 

Montevideo is pronounced in an interesting way in your videos—Monte-video—, as if it were a fiction work, more than it is a city. Is that the case?

The name Montevideo is a fiction, or at least an abstraction, and no one knows exactly where it comes from. There are many different hypotheses, but to this day, no one has ever claimed “I was the one who named it.” Therefore, I came up with the idea of rebaptizing it as Monte-video. This coincidence between the name of the city that I was born in and the fact that I am a video artist has always seemed weird to me. The Greeks would place their gods on Mount Olympus, and even Hollywood has a mount that characterizes it. How could I not establish the Global Mecca of Video Art in Monte-video, when I come from there? On the other hand, I have always felt very close to Isidore Ducasse, the Comte de Lautréamont, who—like myself—was also a Uruguayan who developed his work abroad, and who used to make a quasi-mythological construction of the place that he had been born in. We also share that… a mythological interest in Monte-video. 

What is your routine like in Spain, and where do you seek elements for your creations nowadays? Do you watch a lot of TV?

I have always been addicted to audiovisual. Wherever there is some moving image, there I am, consuming it. Now I am superconnected to YouTube, at alarming levels... of near-addiction (laughs). For real! I love the type of random narrative that is created when one surfs YouTube, the leaping from one subject to another, the amount of information accumulated, the possibility for everyone to have their own television channel, and what is best, it reaches millions of users worldwide, regardless of nationality. Nowadays I almost never watch TV, I replaced it with YouTube. I think I have already watched as much TV as I could, because I actually never got as involved with a soap opera as I did with Vale tudo. Something has changed. There are some series that I really like, such as South Park, Family Guy, So Notorious, or The Simple Life, featuring Paris Hilton. There is a terror and science fiction channel in Spain called Calle 13 [13th Street], and at night they show empty cemeteries, I watch that one too, but I am not truly connected to anything. I believe that that type of narrative is becoming obsolete. It all seems slow to me and, after a while, it bores me. Nothing captures my attention anymore as Vale tudo did, there no longer are characters like Odete Roitman. On the other hand, I think TV is much too structured—makeup, hairstyles, technicians for everything... because of advertising, now it is a controlled medium, whereas YouTube is the opposite, it is destructured, fresh, and has a nerd aesthetics that interests me. It is true that, for the time being, it is in an Atari-like stage, or more like TK90, but in a few years we all are going to be as much—or even more—connected to it than to the television set. Anyway, I think television is a medium to be investigated, as there are still things to be invented in it. Four years ago I did an interview show for TV in Madrid. It was something fresh and spontaneous that I was invited to do for a season in a Spanish TV network. I made good use of that invitation, because I was able to show the whole gamut of clichés used by female Argentine TV show hosts, which is something that is embedded in me, things that I grew up with. I would go on air wearing a pearl necklace and when the show began I would show the clothes that I was wearing that day, it was real fun. It was an experience that revealed the power generated by the TV set. To this day, people stop me in the streets because of that show. One has to know how to use that power. Now, I want to repeat that experiment with a new proposal, and I am preparing a new TV show. I love to investigate. 

Your character is a successful Latin American artist who attained success in Europe due to the fact that he knew the secrets of the “almighty pop.” How was Martín Sastre, the character, created?

I think you are wrong. Martín Sastre is not a character. Martín Sastre is me.

PROFESSIONAL BACKGROUND

In the country of Joaquín Torres García (1874-1949) and under the auspices of the Cinemateca Uruguaya, two of the noblest artistic institutions in the small southern country, the personal experience of Martín Sastre—the constant reinterpretation of the avalanche of imported contents in the light of daily life, through a filter of healthy distrust (the artist claims that ever since he was little he always felt that everything he watched in a screen was “a setup”), as he explains in his Interview for this Dossier)—resulted in a satirical oeuvre, faithful to the minutest details that keep the media gears turning, triumphantly, all over the world, capable of provoking empathy in all kinds of (television) audiences, because it does not require the fantasies that the middle man explicitly or implicitly has.

Torres García, creator of the constructive universalism—an aesthetic-philosophical doctrine that combines principles of proportion, unity, and structure, seeking an art that is native of America, “powerful and virgin,” as the artist, theoretician, and professor used to define—, was the person who illustrated that which is currently South America’s best-known concept of historical, ideological, and cultural reinterpretation, based on the upside-down representation of the American continent, transcribed in the map América invertida [Inverted America], which the Uruguayan master developed in the 1940s.

Half a century later, Sastre updates that proposition: he invented the Confederation of American Nations, a South American empire led by Bolivia, which overthrows the United States from its position of global leader, after defeating the country in the War for Control over Fiction. Bolivia 3: Confederation Next, the saga’s title, represented Uruguay in the 26th Bienal de São Paulo, in 2004.

At the Cinemateca, Sastre soaked in all of the learning that the organization destined to children after the fall of the dictatorship regime in the country, in 1985, a more-than-bombastic stimulus for someone who is fanatical for screens, big and small, as the artist defines himself: “I have always been addicted to audiovisual. Wherever there is an image in motion, I will be there, consuming.” Among the first experiments with video resulting from a childhood and adolescence packed with images in motion, there came The E! True Hollywood Story, a work made in 2000 and which, in many aspects, already laid the foundations for the artist’s later works: the emergence of his pop-star condition, the protagonism in narratives, the disclosure of some transforming and spectacular information or fact, the bridge that establishes itself between the domestic, trivial world of the anonymous citizen and the vaudeville reality of the famous people.

In The E! True Hollywood Story, Sastre explores the sensational or uncommon in his biography—the fact that he drank gasoline as a baby, the confusion between the figure of the Pope and that of a rock star—to create a sort of introduction to a personality that is out of the ordinary, brilliant and visionary, intriguing and seductive, which will unfold into new adventures, under fantastic circumstances, in his following videos.

The artist takes stories of his personal life to the mass culture field, reformulating them with a pop appeal, but that is not all. He also dilutes the borders (in case there are still any) between art and popular culture, by massifying supposedly hermetic genres, such as performance or video art.

A clear example is the TV show he hosted in Spain in 2003, where he let out all of the “couch-potato culture” amassed during years of watching TV in Argentina, presenting himself with the traits and styles of the electronic divas of the neighboring country.

Those same aesthetics accompanied another feat accomplished that year: the launch of The Martín Sastre Foundation for the Super Poor Art, established to obtain sponsorships for young Latin American artists.

In the homonymous video made in 2003, where he presents the goals and the functioning of the organization, the author makes an appearance in the paradigmatic white cube of contemporary art, also dressed in white, with a pearl necklace wrapped around him. The vision is that of a guru-art patron who, sitting on top of the traditional artistic production circuits—a position he reached thanks to an unusual sagacity, and despite coming from the South American “backyard”—, prepares, encourages, and operates the reformulation of that system, or at least the equal redistribution of the benefits contained in the reservoir of abundance of the developed world. “Prada for all,” Sastre utters, in praying position.

More recently, the rich and famous in Britain have become the artist’s focus of attention. In 2005, with Diana: The Rose Conspiracy, Sastre revisited his grunge adolescence in Uruguay in the 1990s, to tell how the Princess of Wales escaped the evil plans of the “architects” of the world order and, contrary to what Humanity believes, lives happily in the outskirts of Montevideo.

Last year, the creator started recording a new saga: to change his identity and live in the body of Robbie Williams, who, in turn, will also live his share of moments as a Latin American. The video, currently being finished, can be partially watched on YouTube—which is now the Shangri-La of audiovisual creation to Sastre, and where he spends hours surfing. In addition to finishing Freaky Birthday, the artist is also working on a project for a new TV show, a territory that is no longer new to him, but in which he believes there is still space for creation. “I guess I have had my share of watching TV. That type of narrative is becoming obsolete. Everything seems slow to me and, after a while, it bores me. I think TV is much too structured—makeup, hairstyles, technicians for everything... because of advertising, now it is a controlled medium, whereas YouTube is the opposite, it is destructured, fresh, and has a nerd aesthetics that interests me,” says Sastre. “Anyway, television is a medium to be investigated, as there are still things to be invented in it.”

The Martín Sastre Foundation
Official Web site of The Martín Sastre Foundation for the Super Poor Art, of which the artist is honorary president. Based on the Internet, the Foundation was established to “support young Latin American artists.” In 2005, it launched the programme Be a Latin American Artist for Three Months and granted a scholarship fund for three German students at the Bauhaus University to live and work in Montevideo, with a monthly income of US$100.00. The Web site also contains instructions on how to “adopt a Latin artist.”

At the NYArts
Under the title La comida estaba deliciosa [The food was delicious], the magazine reviews Sastre’s career and oeuvre. For the publication, the artist plays the “fun” role of international art celebrity “not as a side effect of his work, but as its very essence.”

Witnesses of Martín Sastre
A fotoblog made by fans of the artist. Features a clipping of recordings made at Martín Sastre’s exhibitions around the world, and photographs related to the universe of his work.