Crafting Nationness: DIY Venezuela in Deborah Castillo’s RAW and Violette Bule’s REQUIEM200≤

Abstract

This article proposes the concept of nationness to explore the nuances and complexities that permeate the symbolic and material efforts to remember, imagine, and re-present the nation among the diasporic community of Venezuelan artists. Focusing on Deborah Castillo’s exhibition RAW (2015) and Violette Bule’s installation REQUIEM200≤ (2018), it analyzes how the two artists engage in a form of crafting that re-presents the nation as raw matter (wood, nails, clay) that never achieves a state of completeness or stability. I argue that this act of crafting is interactive and critical. It does not simply remember Venezuela and reproduce it as a spectacle to be passively consumed abroad; it provides the possibility to intervene in systems of power and representation that determine which bodies are visible and which are not, which bodies have power and which do not, which bodies are mourned and who should mourn them. In crafting what I call “Venezuelanness,” the artists’ work offers the space and the means to think (about) the country differently, beyond the spatial boundaries of its territory, beyond the icons that monopolize its collective imaginary, and beyond the extreme polarization of its politics.