Testigos del desarraigo

A series of 60 images from the latest photo essay by visual artist Marylee Coll is presented as the result of an extensive and thorough visual inquiry carried out during the last decade, inside several houses in the city of Caracas. In this unusual series of images there is a vast inventory of objects, equipment and furniture attributed to other times and geographical latitudes; a fascinating aesthetic repertoire of indistinct stylistic origin confined today to the theatricality distanced from domestic scenarios that, when revealed by the curious look of the artist, trace a fragmented and anachronistic story that exposes, without apparent nostalgia, a conjunctural chapter and the dramatic corollary of contemporary Venezuela. These unique records that tell - always in the absence of its inhabitants - the possible narratives of the place and the inanimate objects it houses, will be interpreted from the observer's vouyeristic perception as the testimony that documents that other recent history of uprooting and abandonment - which also It is a metaphor for a country in conflict. This suggestive portfolio of images focuses on the functional and decorative content present in numerous homes and buildings where the usual "garage sales" are made. Homes and shelters of a middle and upper class in Caracas that once belonged to people who have died and forgotten or, in most cases, to entire families who, for various reasons, have decided to leave the country. As the task of the ethnographer, Marylee Coll uses these extreme circumstances to document not only the way in which the dynamics of an informal economy that has prospered in our environment operates, but also the possibility of creating an image archive that represents nature of a certain domestic aesthetic and which, in turn, proposes various types of architectural design and construction, evidencing the paradoxes of a culture of its own from an archeology illustrated in the framework of private space.