Whale Vomit Can Make You Rich, 2016

Single-channel video
4’11”

Whale Vomit Can Make You Rich draws from a critical analysis of the literary, artistic and political Venezuelan avant-garde movement El Techo de la Ballena The Roof of The Whale. Mainly known in the 60’s for its rebellious and turbulent origins and for being a counter-current movement that rejected any form of geometrical abstraction in art, blaming its advocate of being superficial and cold. Whale Vomit Can Make you Rich, aims to understand, analyze and respond to the movement, by breaking the unyielding artificiality and cold aesthetic of geometric abstraction through a series of poetic-political acts that travel from old nationalisms and memories to personal affects of the Venezuelan diaspora. The whale acts as a plastic container, a symbolic space of transformation, conceptually linked to the natural process of digestion, where all these elements are blended in and digested together in turbulence as a carnal attempt to relate to the movement and the past.

BA Visual Arts Thesis project at NABA, Milan