Virginia Perez-Rattun. She asks whether the empire really rule in the sense that we being part of any hegemony that we legitimate it both as citizens and as artists. Kind of interesting inversion of the regular discourses. Pity I didn’t get along to the conference.Virginia Pérez-Ratton is a ‘re-inventor’ of Central America; she has managed to bring together the different artistic terrains of this fragmented and isolated region and has generated a profile for it. With enormous tenacity she introduces artistic environments in and from the countries of Central America to each other and to the rest of the world. She is more than simply the director of TEOR/éTica; more than an independent curator and art critic who is in great demand: she is an ‘art activist’ who transgresses boundaries. Examines the place of art in a world that is deliberately polarised by the fear of terrorism. This is a collection of essays compiled from The Empires, Ruins + Networks conference, held in September 2004, which sets out to provoke a dialogue between art and politics. Perez-Rattun in her book Empires, Ruins and Networks -The Transcultural Agenda in Art states that the political responsibility of artists in a globalized society is debated in this collection of articles by authors from Africa, Australia, South America, Europe, and Scandinavia. Bemoaning the competition for tourist dollars among the world’s great cities and the commodification of cultural artifacts, these artists propose real and imagined places where art might resist capitalism, such as failed urban developments, among refugees, and in rural outposts.