Sirenata en B is an audiovisual work originally conceived as a multi-channel video installation featuring nine synchronised projectors, but remastered for its 40th anniversary as a single-channel video installation.

The video weaves a dreamlike narrative centred on a bus driver in Panama City. Drawing on 15,000 colour photographs taken by Eleta, the piece constructs an animated canvas that documents and reimagines the so-called ‘red devils’, city buses adorned with a vibrant and deeply local popular aesthetic.

With no dialogue, but accompanied by an eclectic soundtrack –ranging from Wagner and Kitaro to Rubén Blades and other salsa tracks– the work explores an aesthetic that has been described as magical realism, in which references to popular culture and Santería coexist with those to everyday life, society and the history of Panama. Its complex production, carried out between Panama and New York –with technical collaboration from Toshi Sakai in the latter– resulted in a seminal work in the history of Latin American art, notable for its expanded use of photography and its exploration of its intersections with storytelling, music and popular culture.

Developed by Sandra Eleta in collaboration with Edgar Soberón Torchia and the Portobelo Group, the work stems from Eleta’s photographic research into city buses and their drivers, exploring the symbolic motivations behind the visual imagery displayed on them.

Sirenata en B follows Lucho, a driver whose bus lacked a painting on the rear door, and who wanted to adorn it with an image he had dreamt of: a mermaid who inspired him on his daily journeys through the city. With this premise, the work gives rise to a narrative that intertwines the everyday and the dreamlike, the urban and the spiritual. To commission the painting, Lucho considers three painters with different styles, until he finds Andrés Salazar, the most suitable artist to bring the image from his dream to life.

First presented in 1984, Sirenata en B has been screened internationally –at the New York Film Festival (1985) and the Rencontres d’Arles festival (1985)– and has been recognised with various awards, such as the Crystal Apple Award (1985), presented by the City of New York, and the MILK Award (Moment of Intimacy, Laughter and Kinship) in 2001.