Autocratic Nostalgia:

Venezuelan Contemporary Landscapes

Giorgio Agamben has suggested that present-day globalization is determined by the intense proliferation of devices (dispositifs). This idea has evolved from the works of Deleuze and, especially, from Michel Foucault, who characterized devices as part of the networks established between social institutions and their relation to power.

Such ideas easily come to mind when observing closely the work of Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck, whose practice consists of a deep documentary exploration that seeks to reveal the connections between artistic production and power games.

Born in Caracas in 1972, Balteo-Yazbeck grew up during the final stage of the accelerated expansion cycle in Saudi-like Venezuela, which was made possible by the presence of oil. It was the time of the downfall of the Venezuelan modernization project within the context of the collapse of all the development projects that had been launched in Latin America since the twenties.

It’s from the malaise that marks an entire generation with the fate of crisis, as well as from other specific experiences that defined his trajectory, that the extraordinary narrative of this work arises. His practice, which began in the mid-nineties, made appropriation its main strategy for artistic creation with the purpose of reinterpreting specific events and deciphering images seen through the eyes of the layman as isolated, innocuous objects. The aim is to analyze the reticle of power and to show, as in the series Cultural Diplomacy: An Art We Neglect (2007-2013), how power skulks, dominates, transforms, but always remains there, operating where one least imagines.

In this sense, the work can be seen as a form of archeology.  It is an endeavor carried out by a researcher who probes amongst palimpsests and who focuses, with meticulous patience, on deciphering the writings hidden under other texts.

The project houses, on the one hand, a sort of retrospective scrutiny that combines the works of local referents, while on the other hand, it tries to place those same works in broader historical contexts and global spaces for discussion in order to question some of its principles and definitions.  Of enormous interest here are, above all, those events that starting in the middle of the last century – within the Good Neighbor Policy, the alleged Alliance for Progress, the Cold War, and the efforts of western powers to contain communism and the emergence of postcolonial movements of the so-called Third World –played a silent role in the combination of those elements that favored the production and circulation of certain works and certain artists.

It’s what Balteo-Yazbeck calls very aptly Modern Entanglements. These works are inscribed in that tradition of conceptual art which is interested, according to its basic principles, in intellectual speculation, in the embellishment of an idea, more than in the production of a totally original object.

Viewed from this perspective, the work constitutes an investigation akin to cultural studies or social science, concentrated on thematizing issues referring to history and the narratives of power. The originality of the work is a result of recombining and recontextualizing apparently neutral, apparently unrelated pieces which suddenly begin to reveal to us their deepest meanings, as essential parts of the complex constellations that articulate the devices of power. Artworks then become visible as raw material for the elaboration of narratives that exceed mere formulations of the world and its creation in the midst of that complex cultural intersection in which art, politics and economics come together. To state it more clearly: art as an ideological instrument.

Traces of the Past

This inquiry into the elements of the past, which is one of the pillars of the research project of this Venezuelan artist, is inserted in a broader phenomenon, an exclusivity that throughout the last two decades has characterized an important part of Venezuelan intellectual production.  I’m referring to that sort of irrepressible desire to turn to the past in search of the key to a better understanding of the complex issues of the present.

But this stepping back into the past isn’t a nostalgic search for those deposits of images that tend to nourish certain myths, or the discovery of a buried collective memory. Quite the contrary, it’s focused on critical observation. It’s a very useful evaluation, especially when that past tends to be idealized in moments of crisis.

More than anything, it’s about observing in broader contexts the continuities and discontinuities of modern Venezuelan history. They are determined today by the authoritarian drift of the so-called Bolivarian revolution and are at play with the political transformations that have occurred across the globe during the past two decades.  It’s an enormously complex movement for art, culture and society in general, which, as Federico Vegas, Venezuelan architect and writer, expresses, tries to tackle “a sort of angst in reflecting on our absurd ailments”, as well as “to explain what the hell is going on with the country’s health”.

In this process of reflection is also inscribed the work of Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck, a production that is a central part of a shift that took him from Caracas to New York in the year 2000, once he had concluded his studies in Fine Arts; and finally to Berlin, in 2010.

However, the artist’s relocation isn’t an isolated movement, rather it’s part of a broader phenomenon: an unexpected migratory volcano of exiles and self-exiles. A growing displacement of a large part of the intellectual elites of the country are today dispersed throughout the world. The loss of his territory of origin, as well as of his natural legitimizing institutions, has affected the production and visibility of his works, but potentiated an international interest in art and cultural markets.

Nonetheless, these global migratory flows are today considered transnational spaces where there are as many gains as losses.  Thus the dynamism and present-day communicational flows, which have intensified connections and exchanges regarding this lost territory, have also brought about a significant reservoir of some of the most important manifestations of Venezuelan art and culture in these times. This is a space that reserves a very special place for the work of Balteo-Yazbeck.

Manuel Silva-Ferrer

Berlin, March, 2017