Living Remains

In my sculptural installation, clay and straw are not just materials—they are memory, living remains of a cry that time has not been able to bury. I reimagine the looted bronzes of the Kingdom of Benin not to replicate them, but to make their absence visible—their forced displacement, their silencing in Western glass cases. In Oxford, where I live, I walk among objects that do not belong to me, yet neither do they belong to those who display them.

 

By gathering fragile materials and found objects, my work highlights the tension between dispossession and resistance. Empires fed on borrowed beauty and chained it in museums; I seek to release these forms through ephemeral gestures, humble matter, fractured languages.

 

As a Venezuelan artist, born of territories also scarred by looting and imposition, I aim to open cracks in official narratives. This piece is not just a tribute—it is an open wound, a broken mirror where colonized cultures still reflect themselves: vibrant, stubborn, alive.