BACKGROUND
I am a migrant in many directions. Migration is present in my work, felt, lived. I have worked it in different facets, and it is like the fluid in every image or story.

2013 "La Barca", an installation made in my experimental workshop in the Botanical Garden of Merida (Venezuela) for the Congress of Pacificacion of the University of the Andes (ULA). Playful work about the "conspiracy of the cable" (Venezuela, end of XIX century).

2017 "Migrantenzirkus", a work born from the daily experience in the Berlin of migrants. It was made of all kinds of waste material. The work recycles itself, purifying or accumulating objects to confuse and create new sensual connections.

As a Venezuelan trained artist I worked on the theme of migration in several works. The 2012 installation "la barca" about historical and prehistoric migration in Venezuela was significant but soon censored for not conforming to the officialist interpretation. Later in Berlin I came across a xenophobic discourse already known but in reverse, which did not even relate to reality, but with confusing fears and hatreds denigrating the dignity of others. It seemed to me as the most essential point.
I immersed myself in the world of Latin migrants, I learned to see the city as a migrant and I presented "Migrantenzirkus" an installation that seeks the visibility of the "other".


At the end of the year 2019 I went to the southernmost point of Europe.
In Tenerife the idea for "The island" was born. Stories that are told differently, emerge from the cacophony of the Circus, voices from the past, voices from the bottom of the sea. Now the sculptural figures change their roles through time. The watchmen transform into conquerors or scissor men being basically the same. There is a continuous presence of the insects who are the "omnipresent denigrated".

In 2022 with "The Extraordinary Journey of Medatia" we penetrate with "Articulario" and Alejandra Pozo in the mythological geography and the performative interpretation.
"The extraordinary journey of Medatia" is a co-creation that articulates a scenic gear ("The island") to narrate an original myth belonging to the cosmovision of the Yekuana people, natives of the upper Orinoco in the Amazon jungle. Scenes of this performance can be developed inside the installation.



Related videos: La Barca, Migrantenzikus, Nosotros, La Isla, Medatia full ed., Teaser Medatia.

 Caracas-Berlin

In the mid-1980s, after long years of wandering through South America, I settled in Venezuela, and was absorbed quite quickly by the art scene there. Caracas was then a thriving melting pot of cultures with unimagined expressive possibilities for artists. Attracted by Venezuela's scenic beauty, unspoiled nature and ideal local conditions, artists came from all over the world. It was the time of international festivals. Culture was writ large and anything was possible.

In opulent Caracas in 1989, the first bloody uprisings took place and I presented myself for the first time with a solo exhibition in the elegant gallery VIA. The ladies and gentlemen who arrived there in their black limousines thought they still had everything under control, which was to turn out to be a fatal error in just ten years.

While my artist colleagues felt more and more drawn to New York or Miami, I was in the mood for the unexplored regions south of the Orinoco or the snow-covered Andes. So I led a life far from Caracas with sporadic performances and exhibitions about my latest discoveries and indigenous acquaintances. I was intensively engaged in ethnology, anthropology, history and shamanism, to which the works of these years bear witness.

At the turn of the millennium, the "Comandante" seized power and systematically poisoned the political climate until the general strike in 2002, which ended with the massive exodus of 300,000 Venezuelans. I also retreated to the island of Barbados, where I worked on an ethnohistorical art project.
Later in the Venezuelan Andes in Mérida, I developed a series of objects and sculptures made from scrap cars and other recycled materials. Through an exhibition, I came into contact with one of the directors of national Petroleum Chemistry, who asked me to develop an artistic social project. With some fellow artists we then set up a foundation and worked for the next two years on a social sculpture a la Beuys in the tropical slums of Venezuela. Quite successful, undogmatic,                                 anti-authoritarian, too beautiful to be, too critical, they decided to wipe us out censor us, and without funds we finally retreat to the Andes...

My design jobs in that years for hotels and clubs are, so to speak, consequence of the expulsion of artists from the public into the private space. But even this is subject to permanent threat.
Art is communication and when this is no longer possible, art is dead. The decision to leave Venezuela was not easy for me. Since I live and work from ideas and exchange with others, I felt that a radical break was necessary and I had to leave.

In Berlin the international scene inspired me, so that i spent nearly two years in this oversaturated city Then i went back to south America in 2019 but it was even whorse repressive.

 Interpretation of the shamanic worlds from the 90th

Fotos Rafael Lacau