Welcome to La Rentrada We laugh to not cry. We invite you to join. Many thanks to the one and only Rafael Arraiz for letting me use his (stolen) voice. For the past year I’ve been taking classes on Venezuelan history with him (and many other brilliant minds in Venezuela) in a class about petroleum, he dropped these two poems that summarize the relationship between petroleum and Venezuelans.

The video has a compilation of public domain videos made by the foreign oil companies when Venezuela’s oil economy was being born + in its early years; “real” videos from my uncle and his friends; public domain photos and my own photos of a childhood exploring petroleum fields; behind the scenes videos of making 'La Rentrada'.

The narrator's voice was inspired by a college professor in Venezuela, who after spending most of his career in Germany, came back with a German accent in Spanish (his native language). It was achieved by having Google Translate read in German text written in English. Thus the mispronunciations. A way to represent how we all will come back changed for La Rentrada.

Many thanks to my uncle for the videos I mentioned above and for always being an inspiration in thinking outside the box. He appears in one of those childhood photos.

On view from 06.01.2021 - 06.27.2021 at the Venezuelan Pavilion of the London Design Biennale at Somerset House.