“The Cervantes Institute invites us to rewrite Don Quixote from an ecological and gender perspective.” With this title, the Spanish portal El Debate published the news last Wednesday. He specifically invokes Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote, which is part of the book Ficciones (1944).
Perhaps the Spanish Institute, named after the author of the Genius Knight Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605) and the second part of the Genius Knight Don Quixote de la Mancha (1615), Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616), will consider embodying the version of this work by a new Pierre Menard. Or on the contrary: forgetting the original work and a new way to re-establish the novel as a literary genre. And the world was given a new Don Quixote. But which one? how?
In its own right, the Cervantes Institute is promoting artist Soliman López’s Iulia Project (1981, Burgos, Spain), curated by contemporary art and digital culture expert Roberta Bosco. She explains on her website: “Iolia presents a large-scale interactive sculpture that turns air into words: a textual wind turbine that rewrites Don Quixote using an artificial intelligence system. This installation transforms the energy of the wind into language, inviting the audience to actively participate in the process of creating the text. The artificial intelligence, trained on the original text, translations and bibliographies of Cervantes’ works, produces variations on the classics from environmental, gender or philosophical perspectives.”
Authoritarians don’t like this
The practice of professional and critical journalism is an essential pillar of democracy. This is why it bothers those who believe they are the bearers of the truth.
“The project does not revise the original text, but rather reinterprets it as a metaphor for human thought versus the machine, provoking reflection on authorship, memory and future sustainability. The exhibition includes an artist’s book featuring Don Quixote 2.0 encoded with synthetic DNA – a technology that allows information to be preserved for thousands of years – and its structure is designed based on the 3D representation that the artist makes of the network of wind turbines distributed throughout the country’s territory.” Castilla-La Mancha, where he captured eight cubic meters of this air from La Mancha, which was fed into an air compressor, along with a documentary of the artistic process of the project.
Thus we have a technological installation with semi-synthetic collective art. It is very complicated for the reader, whether he knows Cervantes’ work or not, how this can lead to a conclusion. So much so that the same institute issued another memorandum containing details, such as: “I wanted to question the relationship between the artist and the public and their intervention in the creative processes and, at the same time, display a work of art without the artist creating it,” Soliman Lopez said.
“The result of this mediation of the creative process will be five texts generated by artificial intelligence, which already has a first version. You can read in them this beginning, in the first chapter, under the title ‘Perpetual Performance of the Digital Man’: ‘In a place on the Internet, whose domain I don’t want to remember, there lived today a man of those with a shaft in the shipyard, an ancient cipher, a slim computer and an algorithm in operation (…)’.” The audience will also find a closed circle of the image, which is created from “a camera placed in a celestial position relative to “The main sculpture is with a wind turbine, which will literally make visitors spin next to the work itself.”
“It is a project that lives on in the Spanish literary tradition, but with critical and urgent questions arising from the explosion of artificial intelligence in our lives,” says curator Roberta Bosco. “Moreover, Cervantes already had an advanced stance for his time and was ahead of the grand narratives of the 21st century.”
Soliman López uses an industrial air compressor to collect air in Campo de Criptana (Ciudad Real) and feed it into the main sculpture, and a high-resolution artificial image of an Iberian imperial eagle, an endangered species and one of the most affected by Spanish wind farms. Likewise, “Iolia” includes an animated digital sculpture, which collects 3,140 geographical locations of wind turbines in Castilla-La Mancha and represents them through their coordinates, adding a three-dimensional dimension. The Cervantes Lounge displays an AI-produced animated video based on Gustave Doré’s engraving of Chapter 8 of Don Quixote, in which the artist performs multiple experiments in search of the monster that Alonso Quijano thought he saw at the windmills.
But this great amount of effort and diversity in “textures” has another reason that the “Debate” article clearly indicates: the confrontation between Luis García Montero, director of the Cervantes Institute, and the director of the Royal Spanish Academy, Santiago Muñoz Machado.
For the first, who considers himself a supporter of these idiomatic expressions, the general masculine plural is uncomfortable, and he prefers the double plural (citizens and citizens). Indeed, the Cervantes Institute’s 2025 yearbook, Spanish in the World, states that the 1978 Spanish Constitution was born “with a democratic deficit” and that it “lacks full democratic legitimacy” because it was not written in inclusive language. Meanwhile, since the opening of the 2025-2026 academic year, Muñoz Machado stated that “no one has thought of setting the rules by decree or subjecting the dictionary to the whims of the government, until today.”
Now, what about Sancho Panza? Could they have deleted him because he was obese?