Eight Years in a Corner
Updated: Oct 21
Silent, poetic and critical gestures
A profile photo on a social network is the image we choose to project of ourselves. Mine on Facebook has stayed the same for eight years: me, sitting on the floor of the Zulia Museum of Contemporary Art (MACZUL), inside my installation Digressions: From the myths and the illusions of splendour. Over time I came to understand that the installation was an anthology, and that the photo shows a habitat of memory in which chronological time unravels into spatial anachronisms. It was also a moment of rupture that I am still trying to understand.
The corner
I made the work from archives of my past projects for the exhibition Cuerpo en Cuestion (Body in Question), curated by María Verónica Machado, Neydalid Molero, and me. I resolved the installation in a corner, built on chronological axes. Horizontally, the country’s time ran: the land before colonization, independence, oil, the illusion of modernity, a red horizon, the diaspora. Vertically, three levels: underground, earth, and air. Lines of aluminum profile guided and separated those readings. The digressions were the pauses within historical time, the space to think about how Venezuela evolves, in time and simultaneously.
Today the corner seems to me an inflection point. It was my last exhibition in Venezuela before I was forced to leave for Canada¹ and begin again. After that room, migrating and migrant became the axis of my work. I had written the diaspora at the end of a timeline, not knowing the last stretch would be mine too.
What was on the wall
The vinyl pieces were leftover scraps from earlier installations and from soft sculptures of my past. The blue, water: Lake Maracaibo, the origin of the city. The black, oil, the wealth that ended up leading us to poverty. The red: the red horizon and the political use of colour that dominated us ideologically. A marbled paper that someone gave me had colours like industrial oxides and helped me with the composition.
Among them, I placed very personal things, processes and archives. A Bolívar in his plaza, veiled under a sheet of paper. An open book of patriotic history by Guzmán Blanco. A seascape from my first painting class, when I did not yet live by a lake. Drawings by my children from preschool, including one about the encounter of two worlds. Photographs from my first solo exhibition, Por el silencio: a seventeen-year-old dancer in my studio, Patricia Velázquez, who later left the country and whom I never saw again. She became the “Wayuu princess,” an image of the land and of Indigenous peoples. Many of those images were veiled under translucent paper, and veiling became a metaphor throughout the corner.
In one of the small boxes I placed a press clipping, ¿Historia sin mujeres? (“History without women?”), which I had kept since my university years without quite knowing why: perhaps to remember someday what had marked me and what interests me. The small cardboard boxes, which once held glass eyeglass lenses from the 1970s, still bear handwritten notes from their previous life.
The far end
At the end of a line, on the floor, I placed a pocket-sized Constitution of Venezuela, pinned under a stone, with a tricolour ribbon peeking out from underneath. On the wall above, at the opposite end from the origin, I first placed a small white duck, the innocent times before the mass migration, and then three small wooden ducks: yellow, blue and red, the colors of the flag, as a symbol of the outgoing diaspora. They came from a 1970s toy production and, for me, held the memory of an innocent, productive and, in some way, slightly irresponsible Venezuela. Below, the law under a stone; above, the toys already leaving.
Those little ducks already had a history. In 2014, in Arqueología lúdica: 100 días (Ludic Archaeology: 100 Days), also at the MACZUL, I used them as a silhouette to cut a blue quilt. After cutting, I left the padding exposed. From that quilt I brought some of the cut-out ducks, which in 2022 became the starting point of Remiendos (Mendings), a project that invites people to mend the edge.
What stayed and what left
There was also a soft vinyl sculpture, long and volumetric, silver-gray with blue, about two and a half meters long, lying on the floor. It took the work out of the plane and carried it into space. The dimensions of the MACZUL allowed me not to hold back, and to develop a device of several moments in dialogue in the corner, an accumulation of memories, meanings and representations in the manner of Kurt Schwitters. And, by coincidence, Schwitters also ended up in exile, trying to rebuild in another country what he had left behind.
When the exhibition ended, I dismantled the work. Most of the pieces came back to my house and some stayed in the MACZUL’s vaults. The wooden ducks, the clipping and much of what I had kept remain in Venezuela. Here in Montreal, I have a few little ducks, painted white and yellow. What crossed over were some glass eyeglass lenses that were not in the installation. In February 2019, during my first winter, I used them to make a series of untitled photographs, seeking, through the lens, a sense of place and belonging. Two years later, the series was part of the exhibition Resilience Gaze at the Centre George Vanier in Montreal.
Clues
Not long ago, my mentor this year in the Art Volt program (Concordia), Nayla Dabaji, recommended Habiter l’exposition (Inhabiting the Exhibition), by Mathilde Roman, when I told her about what I had been working on. I then understood that for years I had been using scenography as a device without naming it: I do not place objects in a room; I build a place to inhabit. In this photo I do so literally, sitting inside the work.
Jonathan Lara wrote that we enter places we do not understand at first, and that we must approach, listen, pause, and stay attentive to the clues. I remember it as a slow understanding that takes time. My objects are those clues, and they survive: Warburg spoke of the survival of images. They do not remember for me, but they change function and return.
In that photo I am sitting on the floor of a room in Maracaibo; in some way, I am still there.
¹ In the years before 2018, Venezuela went through an economic, social and political collapse: hyperinflation, shortages of food and medicine, the deterioration of public services and institutions, and the repression of protest. Almost seven million Venezuelan refugees and migrants now live in Latin America and the Caribbean, according to R4V, the UN platform for this crisis (August 2026), and others elsewhere in the world. I am one of them.
Catalogue: Cuerpo en cuestión: Exposición Colectiva, designed and edited by Andrés Matute.
Thanks to Nayla Dabaji for the book and the conversation; to María Verónica Machado and Neydalid Molero, with whom I curated Cuerpos en Cuestion; to Helisandro Molero and the MACZUL team, who supported the exhibition design and continue to safeguard part of this work; and to Andrés Matute for the design and editing of the catalogue.
Photos: the profile picture is from Revista Tendencia (Maracaibo), and the photograph of the artist in the installation is by María Verónica Machado. María Alejandra Sánchez provided the gallery views; the rest are from the artist’s archive.
Elsy Zavarce is a visual artist, curator, educator and researcher. She holds a PhD in Art Education (Concordia University, 2025) and is Professor Emerita at the University of Zulia, with more than four decades of exhibitions, curatorial work and research. She directs Escolarte.
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