Manuela Zárate

My search has its roots in the medium of ceramics, coupled with a special interest in Latin American culture, pre-Hispanic and the influence of the conquest and the founding discourses of the new world in contemporary Venezuelan culture, tracing cross-cutting themes about our imaginary of wealth, the myth of the golden, exuberance of the Caribbean and wild territory. The research has led me to create a relationship of multiple symbolic and plastic resources to develop proposals that reflect on the complex cultural hybridizations and the challenges they imply for the development of our countries, communities, families and individualities. I have focused my plastic work in a disciplinary and transversal way, from these objects-images-installations to make bridges between the history of art and its critical power and the role of archive-memory to look at ourselves, think about ourselves and continue building ourselves as a society. The formal searches of my work have been developed from themes of art history; totems, venus, reliefs and anthropomorphic figures, incorporating new symbols and objects anchored to the contemporary imaginary. I delve into the atlas of migrations and symbolic exchanges, cultural diversity, ecology, the body, the local and the global, and the vision of the world from the feminine.