Valeria Guaimare
Valeria’s practice questions culture, identity and our relationship to the natural world through an absurdist lens. Investigating what happens when meaning loosens, when something can be felt before it is fully understood, when humour and unease sit side by side.
Venezuelan heritage and years in Scotland shape the work. She does not try to resolve these positions but allows them to remain in tension, informing the materials and spaces. Within this in-between, ancestral knowledge becomes a living presence. It is something she returns to and reworks, developing a Latin-futuristic language that holds memory and speculation at once.
Recent works focus on immersive environments that ask for presence. These are spaces that invite a slower engagement, where interaction and play emerge naturally as part of a shared experience. Meaning is not fixed but formed through movement, through attention, through the subtle relationship between body and environment.
No Llore Por El Petróleo – I Didn’t Cry For The Petrol
“Americans just want Venezuelan oil” …who doesn’t?
Venezuela, a country flattened into resource, measured only by what can be taken.
You can’t grieve something that was never yours. The coast remembers what headlines will never understand. The sea gathers fragments thrown into the waves, songs of desire for better days and the dreams of the lives left behind.
Under crisis, no narrative is seamless.
Set in the waters off the coast of Venezuela, this piece utilises a petrol-laden seashell as an archival basin. The vessel collects the stories of people who have had to leave over the past 27 years, representing anthropological sediment that has sunk to the bottom of the sea. Whilst chaos reigns above, the sea maintains a quiet calm, a witness to the turmoil above. The piece’s exterior represents the extraction narratives we see play out time and time again when Venezuela is discussed in the media. A broken country, fighting itself, and only deemed important when resources are involved. All this weight, hanging by an impossible thread as people continue to live and survive despite endless adversities. Yet all the shiny petrol, gold, and lithium do not matter to Venezuelans; what matters is the heart of the people and the connections that have been severed due to crisis and corruption. The love felt at a distance is more valuable than any material resource could ever be.
2.5M X 2.5M Mylar Film
For Sale: £3,500
