Fourteenth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

According to the United Nations, 2.6 million Venezuelans have migrated since 2014 to other countries in South America, mainly due to violence, hyperinflation, and food and medicine shortage in their home country. Only Colombia is sheltering one million Venezuelans, and that figure continues to increase due to the COVID-19 crisis, which has only aggravated the economic and sanitary situation in Venezuela. The way in which the Colombian political elite has dealt with the Venezuelan migration crisis, as can be attested by the government’s decision to not vaccinate Venezuelan migrants against COVID-19, calls for alternative representations that transcend ideological binaries to focus instead in the human ordeal that the Venezuelan exodus entails. Those alternative representations would necessarily oppose the mass-mediatic approach that informs the general view about this ongoing crisis. The resistance to the ideologically-driven regimes of representation that dominate the current debate about the Venezuelan exodus can be seen in artworks like Beatriz González’s Zulia, Zulia, Zulia (2015), an oil on canvas that depicts the plight of hundreds of thousands of anonymous immigrants carrying refrigerators, TV sets, and beds through the Táchira river. For González, the ultimate symbol of migration and displacement is condensed in the image of human figures carrying their belongings. This paper analyzes how González’s pictorial exploration of that symbol is paradigmatic of an aesthetics of resilience that elicits crucial reflections about the aporias of nationality, assimilation, belonging, adaptation, and mobility in times of emergency.