It is possible that the tinge suggested by the concatenation of the title I have chosen for this text might strike the reader as obvious—like everything that gets trapped within a discourse. So, I must warn you: though we might get to the same point, this route won’t parade any enemies for stoning, nor fathers | … |

When power wants to rise as a totalitarian power, the pretension includes language. Under this type of ideological domination, language is rarefied and some of its particular traits atrophied: the prerogative to name the world, the ability to unveil truth. Language certainly becomes a prisoner, obscured and domesticated under the interests of power.

For something to be art, it must meet certain conditions. One of them is that it not be real; it must be fiction, discourse. Artists use images that are not entirely familiar. Something stands out and points out that this object is trying to mean something, to say, to offer a constructed sensory experience. Its existence is possible only through the transcendence of instinct, and in the affirmation of the individual as autonomy.

TEMPORADA DE MANGOS – JOSÉ OSTOS FOR BACKROOM CARACAS ON VIMEO.   Recorded over several months during his daily commute and with a small camera, this video essay by Venezuelan filmmaker José Ostos is a look at the symbolic fabric of the city of Caracas. From its prose poetry narration, its degraded image, its panoramic views, | … |

A look at Monstruos #1, a fanzine published in February 2014 in Madrid. Participants: Enrique Ventosa, Rebecca Hourdaki, Jorge Frigenti, Eugenio Fernández, Paula Currás, Ana Olmedo, Alvaro Carrillo, Fernando Cremades, Carlos Ramírez Pantanella.  

It was exactly 500 years ago that the first edition of Thomas More’s On the Best State of a Republic and on the New Island of Utopia appeared. Utopia, as it is commonly known, turned out to be a signifier that has managed to adhere—without it being its original aim— plenty of human projects of the | … |

Because we are almost ghosts, we composers appreciate apparitions; their sincerity is absolute. P.D.   I   God is an uncontrollable noise. For others, God is silence. But here we are going to talk about Paul. Music recreates prejudice and at the same time devices for survival and for self-destruction, where flesh, innocence, and anguish | … |

El Helicoide, May 18, 2016. Luis Theis has been imprisoned inside the beast of concrete and rebars that sits on top of Roca Tarpeya, hoping to awaken from a modernity that never came. Torture, rapes, and disappearances sleep together in a place where drugs and prostitution have been guests already. This time, the monster temporarily houses, like a terrifying hotel, the detainees from the march held in Caracas in support of the recall referendum convened by the opposing Mesa de la Unidad Democrática (MUD), which after a strong intervention from the Bolivarian National Police (PNB) and the appearance of the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service (SEBIN), resulted in 44 detainees nationwide (14 of them in Caracas).

But what is the place of political jokes in the crisis that surrounds us? Let us begin by stating that within a polarized context there is no discourse capable of dealing with any possible tolerance of the crisis (its difficulties and horrors), because neither requires elaboration; on the contrary, the polarized discourse is that of certainties, of repetition, of mere speculation without questioning. In every polarized discourse lies a project of erasing difference.

(Notes for an autoethnography)   I saw the show on Venezolana de Televisión [1] dedicated to emigration in our country. As I watched, I couldn’t help remembering the child I was on February 4, 1992 [2], with my chewed and well-thumbed Pictorial Atlas of the World, trying to imagine how Rome or Atacama could even exist. | … |

  The idea stems from the artwork, or rather from the assumption that the work of art can stir up things inside. But given that not every work of art produces something in anyone, one must inquire, feel, expose eye and body; submit to the experience of the senses and to chance as well. The | … |

As in any first-degree equation, we must clear the variable, in this case, the artistic scene (X), which, ever capricious and brutal, behaves like an electron: it appears and disappears, visibilizing and invisibilizing the peripheral or nuclear elements that it sometimes orbits and sometimes doesn’t.

Lamezuela, a sign that arises from and accounts for the malaise, the defect, and the ingrown spine of our time. A sign that has “become an iconic image of the moment we are living as a country”; an untimely sign that impacts and collides – with all its implications – with the cultural and historical perception of our time.

Recounting a trip you returned from some time ago is no piece of cake. There is always a sort of slip of the head, as if the past had slid down the shower drain, as if “returning” was a haircut with memory at the tips. This is why sometimes keeping a journal is an advantage, or if none exists, having been more or less consistent with the uploading of photos and thoughts to cyberspace—this dematerialized place we so inhabit—could also work. There we can search for what was said and seen—to avoid repetition or to invoke it—: to live up in the clouds.