by Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber

Since the 1998 election of President Hugo Chavez, there has been a major shift in national politics in Venezuela, and Venezuelan society is undergoing a process of reconstruction made by the people. Building on Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space and his seminal concept that every society produces its own space through its own spatial practice, in the series of works entitled Caracas, Hecho en Venezuela, we emphasize processes of the production of the city by looking at specific sites and modes of production.
In Caracas, a city embedded into the global oil economy, yet with a history of radical politics, we witnessed forms of urbanism that are the engine of a greater social transformation. This transformative urbanism is both spatial and social, and in this city which is spatially divided by class, social conflicts are marked by territories.
The lines drawn by architecture, which delineate class struggle, are porous because formal and informal practices cut throughout this city of five million. Formal practices that pass through institutions, companies, and governmental structures are not the right of only the powerful, and informal practices, such as street vending and self-organized house construction on the city’s hills, are not merely the cultural domain of the weak. The production of space is intertwined with both informal and formal practices. Spatial programs like urban and rural land reform, land titles, and urban agriculture are tied to healthcare and educational programs, which provide an infrastructure for informal practices and formalized social services for the country’s impoverished.
Yet, as part of what Chavistas call the Bolivarian Process (or, commonly, “el processo”), these reforms and programs are not solely administered and executed from above by governmental structures, but are at the same time forcefully initiated from below by collective community organizations, which have existed for decades. The relationship between the historic modernist housing projects from the 1950s, designed by Venezuela’s Paris-trained architect Carlos Raul Villanueva, and the current urban restructurings driven by the dynamic of formal and informal processes, are central to our research in Caracas.
Working collaboratively for the past 10 years, we focussed on the field of architecture and urbanism, exploring the conditions of urban life in relation to the distribution of power. We investigated the possibility of visually interpreting and critically commenting on urban and architectural structures in terms of their potential for extensive social change. The exhibition is a result of our six-month urban research project, carried out in Caracas in 2003, in which we examined how architecture, urban structures, and entire territories in Caracas have been appropriated, “re-territorialized,” and transformed by the people who live in them.
Caracas, Hecho en Venezuela runs until September 11 at the Charles H. Scott Gallery, Emily Carr Institute, 1399 Johnston Street in Vancouver. The exhibition includes photography, video, and billboard projects. A 48-page, full-colour artists’ book, co-published with Revolver – Archiv für aktuelle Kunst, will accompany the exhibition. Gallery hours: Monday to Friday, noon to 5 pm and Saturday and Sunday, 10 am to 5 pm. Admission is free. Visit the Bitter/Weber website at www.lot.at