While civic protests that took place over several weeks in Caracas and throughout the country in April 2017 were being repressed with tear gas and rubber bullets before reaching their objective of arriving at various public institutions located in the city center, small groups of demonstrators with banners—linked to the visual and performing arts—managed to achieve that goal, at least on two occasions.

The first was on April 21, when they reached the Municipal Theater of Caracas, the venue of the government-organized Theater Festival, carrying a large banner that read “We left the Guaire with a clear conscience.” This was a reference to an incident in which marchers had to plunge into the fetid waters of the river that runs through the capital in order to evade the toxic barrage fired by the Bolivarian National Guard.

Then, on April 28, they gathered in front of the Ombudsman's Office, forming a human sign with their T-shirts that read “It could have been me,” alluding to a phrase by Yibram Saab, the son of the head of the so-called “moral power,” regarding the death of a student at the Metropolitan University caused by the impact of a tear gas bomb in Altamira.

In both cases, the repressive response of the government to the peaceful mobilizations of a majority sector of the population—demanding respect for the legislative branch, the release of political prisoners, the removal of magistrates, and the holding of elections to remedy the alteration of the constitutional order—was strongly condemned.

Both actions represent a challenge to the self-absorbed rhetoric of the governmental sector, which is entrenched in a deliberate attempt to ignore citizens’ demands, within a framework of strict information control aimed at blocking and silencing dissenting voices, as well as at omitting or downplaying the gravity of the events.

Likewise, these actions were carried out “from the body” and with the word—two realms of high significance in the struggle that Venezuelan society has waged for several years. The body is what receives the impacts of rubber bullets, what suffocates from the gas, what bears the direct brunt of violence. The word is “the other cheek” of a civil conscience slapped by power; it is what responds to the absurdity and ideological euphemisms of the repressive authority and its spokespeople.

Original article written by Félix Suazo for Tráfico Visual.