Mappa Mundi of Matanzas, Venezuela
This work provides a glimpse into the artist’s life growing up in Mapanare, a steel plant industrial zone in Ciudad Guayana, Venezuela, in the 1970s and 1980s. This was a period of marked economic prosperity in Venezuela relative to its neighbors. The country leveraged its natural resources through exports of oil and heavy industry products like steel to achieve the highest standard of living in Latin America at the time. The map incorporates family photographs and a handwritten poem penned by the artist’s mother shortly after immigrating there. In her writings, the artist’s mother details experiences as an immigrant and of cultural exchange with the Venezuelan neighbors, from whom she learned to make arepas and to whom she showed how to wear a sari. She expresses her love for Venezuela and the warmth of its people.
The black herons in the foreground of the painting reference La Garza Negra y de Hierro, the music album and title song by renowned Venezuelan poet and musician Chelique Sarabia. The album was released in Dec 1975 on a limited LP commissioned by SIDOR (Siderúrgica de Orinoco), the largest Venezuelan state-owned steel corporation, where the artist’s father worked.
Sarabia’s lyrics of the songs in the album lament the industrialization and urbanization of the Orinoco region and the extraction of Venezuelan petroleum, leaving the rural way of life and the changing landscapes of the grasslands and jungles. The title song is a beautiful, metaphorical piece that compares oil rigs to an iron black heron sucking life from the earth beneath the lake with its beak before flying off to foreign lands, carrying the black oil of the Venezuelan soil, the blood and sweat of its people. The black iron heron’s eyes, like the lake, are filled with tears, listening to the sad song of the earth and its people.
