Wire Mesh and Sand Sculptures of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Caracas at El Consulado de la República de Pachanga
Venue: El Consulado de la República de Pachanga
Location: New York, NY
Duration: May 23-June 22, 2025
Memories of Sand, part of the Inoperable Cities series, transforms the liminal space of El Consulado into a living meditation on memory, displacement, and cultural preservation—core themes of the gallery. The project centers on the participatory creation of sand sculptures representing Venezuelan museums, beginning with the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas Sofía Ímber (MACCSI).
This temporary, community-built installation captures the fragility and resilience of cultural institutions, evoking childhood memories of building sandcastles on Venezuelan beaches and the precarious state of the nation’s cultural heritage.
Through architectural forms and geometric structures inspired by Venezuelan brutalism, the work bridges past and present, homeland and diaspora, memory and reconstruction. It honors Sofía Ímber's legacy while exploring how museums become living monuments to collective memory.
Sofía Ímber was a visionary journalist, cultural advocate, and one of Venezuela’s most influential figures in the arts. In 1974, she founded the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas Sofía Imber (MACCSI), which quickly became one of Latin America's most important contemporary art institutions. Her relentless efforts to build the museum's collection positioned Venezuela on the international cultural map, bringing works by artists such as Alexander Calder, Pablo Picasso, and Francis Bacon to Caracas.
Ímber’s leadership transformed the MACCSI into a dynamic space of cultural exchange, education, and artistic innovation. She saw the museum not just as a repository of objects but as a living, evolving entity that should remain accessible to all, regardless of social class.
However, in 2001, Ímber was controversially dismissed during a live television broadcast by then-president Hugo Chávez, symbolizing the beginning of the systematic erosion of cultural institutions in Venezuela. Despite this, her vision endures. The MACCSI stands as a monument to her life's work—a fragile but powerful testament to the potential of cultural spaces to shape collective identity and memory.
Inoperable Cities: Memories of Sand pays homage to Ímber's legacy by reconstructing the MACCSI as a temporary, participatory sculpture—a gesture that mirrors both the museum’s historical weight and its current precarity. By reimagining the MACCSI in sand, the project underscores the transience and resilience of cultural memory, especially within communities displaced from their homeland.
You can read more about Sofia Ímber's legacy here.
Construction Materials:
Documentation Equipment (provided by the gallery):
The project’s heartbeat lies in its collaborative nature. Gallery visitors and local participants are invited to contribute to the sculpture’s construction, shaping it both physically and symbolically. These daily sessions will transform the gallery into an active site of shared cultural production, aligning with El Consulado’s mission to foster community-driven artmaking and cross-cultural dialogue.
Inoperable Cities: Memories of Sand explores the tension between cultural preservation and displacement within the Venezuelan diaspora. By building museums in sand—ephemeral yet monumental—the work suggests that cultural memory endures even when institutions collapse or are left behind.
Through Sofía Imber’s vision and the reimagining of Venezuelan museums as portable, fragile architectures, the installation underscores the paradox of preservation: cultural institutions can be both steadfast symbols and delicate constructions shaped by time, politics, and migration.
The first iteration of the 'Inoperable Cities' installations, 'Modelo de Estado' was shown at the International Biennial of Contemporary Art/ULA 2022, The return of things.
For further context, see: The Decline of Art Museums and the Arts in Venezuela.
This project stems from my exploration of how cultural institutions survive, dissolve, and transform across geopolitical rifts and physical borders, carrying the weight of collective memory. In this iteration, sand—a material of childhood, play, and coastal landscapes—becomes a metaphor for the delicate work of rebuilding identity from fragments.
Through this living installation, I invite participants to experience cultural preservation as a process of shared making, where institutions can be reimagined, reassembled, and given new life within immigrant communities.
Beyond this iteration and as an ongoing project, I will continue to recreate sculptural models of the MACCSI in various materials and installation forms, persisting in this artistic process until the Chavismo and the Bolivarian socialist movements, and more importantly, the Maduro narco-terrorist authoritarian regime, release their stranglehold on Venezuelan society.
