by Elvira Blanco
By mid-2019, the number of Venezuelans to migrate since the beginning of the Chavista regime in 1999 has reached four million. The phenomenon increased dramatically over the past 4 years, with people fleeing food and healthcare shortages, violence, skyrocketing inflation, and abysmally low wages. The consequences are felt across Latin America, as countries of the region grapple with a ceaseless influx of migrants, many of them refugees. Meanwhile, in the background of the dramatic material consequences of this crisis, Venezuelan society is undergoing the process of conceiving itself, for the first time, as a migrant population. As a relatively prosperous petro-state, it was always on the receiving end of migratory movements––from Colombians displaced by the war to Peruvians and Ecuadorians fleeing collapsing economies, to Lebanese and Syrians and Italian, Spaniard and Portuguese peasants in the 1940s and 50s––; hence, the last two decades have seen the first mass emigration movement in Venezuelan history. A heated debate about how migration should take place and what it means rages on in traditional and social media today. The millions of migrants have also become the object of political disputes among the groups that compete for power. And as more people leave Venezuela, intellectuals and artists have also begun to address this new diasporic dimension of their culture. Many of them work from a migratory position themselves, or in precarious conditions in Venezuela, usually with no institutional funding.
Sebastián Llovera (Valera, Venezuela, 1992) resides in Caracas. A trained visual artist, he is interested in reading maps against the grain and using them as surfaces to be drawn on, bleached, and painted over. He describes his work with cartographic documents as “reinventing the notion of territory” and articulating the transformations left by the passing of time on charted terrains. He received the first prize in the 2019 Jóvenes con FIA Salon, perhaps the most important award for young Venezuelan artists, which was resurrected this year after a period of inactivity. Significantly, Llovera’s piece is titled Devices for nonlinear trajectories, and it consists of a mural installation of maps, cyanotypes and drawings that can be activated with an Augmented Reality app.
Well-known artists like Mexican Teresa Margolles and Argentine Marcelo Brodsky have recently addressed the movement of Venezuelans into Colombia. Margolles has created participative works with the migrants and those who help them, while Brodsky has referenced the striking view of a river of people crossing over to Colombia by foot along the Simón Bolívar Bridge. Rather than working at or with the border itself, Llovera chooses to deterritorialize his work completely. There is no presence of the familiar outlines of Venezuela or Colombia; these are uncanny and unspecific maps, painted blue and overlaid on each other. In his own words, Llovera “reverses” the original meaning of the maps: documents meant for orientation and scientific knowledge become opaque, the relational logic that binds them together hidden from the spectator.
The maps no longer work for their intended objective. Although this is a common trope in contemporary art, the gesture of refusing geographical specificity at a time when borders are so politically significant is strangely provocative. Llovera cannot escape his inclusion in the wider discussion on migration in Venezuelan art––the work, after all, is situated, produced inside Venezuela––but he can confer the debate with an aura of estrangement. What does this attitude of disaffection do?
Once one looks past the initial disturbance of deterritorialization, Devices for nonlinear trajectories can be compelling. It speaks about migration in a different way than is being done widely. The magnitude of the diaspora has inundated the Venezuelan imaginary with emotionally charged, on-the-ground images of the migrant process: how migrants live, what they bring with them, what they leave behind, how they behave. Llovera’s insistence on proposing indeterminate trajectories, with maps so devoid of human character and conventional usefulness that they can be scanned to reveal sound files in the Cloud, refers to the phenomenon of dispersion, the reorganization of things in space, the very instability of the migrant trajectory itself. For those who have lived it, after all, migration is indeed a meandering trajectory: getting around flight restrictions, exchange control and migratory bureaucracy are only some examples of the detours and delays of the process of leaving. As the crisis continues, Venezuelans must also face the path towards redefining their own identity, now dispersed and, indeed, nonlinear.
