New Compositional Thinking
Now, in the Venezuelan case, it is no longer about a Land of Grace, as Cristopher Columbus would put it in the chronicles of his trips to the New World. The modern utopias anchored in the ideals of a cornucopian nature have been transformed, with the sudden and intensive exploitation of the underground mineral resources, into real individual and collective tragedies. The recent history of Venezuela bears witness to this: a nation that, in spite of holding the biggest oil reserves in the world, has not been able to warrant economic growth and social equity to it’s citizens.

From this perspective, Muu Blanco proposes to invert the Venezuelan oil imaginary through the series New Compositional Thinking (2014). In this work, Blanco carries out an intervention on a set of images referring to the Venezuelan oil epic, first published in the photography magazine Extra Cámara, by inserting a scapular bearing the effigy of Chapulín Colorado. No doubt, the intention of such an insertion is that the spectator recalls the famous TV character’s phrase: And now, who will defend us? At the same time, it is evident that with this work Muu Blanco denounces the cult of oil in the same way that the historian Germán Carrera Damas exposed some years back the cult of Bolivar, so deeply entrenched in Venezuelan culture.

Foto libro de Muu Blanco
Texto: Gerardo Zavarce
Diseño Grafico: Muu Blanco