I Can’t Hear the Birds: Tracing the Memories of Venezuela’s Lost Fantasy

Over 7 million Venezuelans have left my country. My family. My friends. Myself. One by one, we all left. I saw my home become empty, and my memories blur, as if looking at my childhood through a foggy window. But I keep coming back, looking for the traces of the promise of prosperity we were given, of the country from my childhood memories and the future we never got to see. I found it, in the middle of solitude, struggling to survive the general decay. Mixing archives from family albums, testimonies of remembrance, documentary images of nowadays Venezuela and multimedia elements, this project is a slow-paced dialogue between the past and present Venezuela. The illusion we built on oil seems to rapidly vanish, and it feels as if I’m trying to photograph a lake before it becomes a desert.

Learn more about Fabiola Ferrero

Participants

Héctor Cavallaro (Caracas, Venezuela).

A Doctor in Musicology, a esearcher-composer for the École Doctorale Esthétique, Sciences et Technologies des Arts (Lab. Musidanse) at the Université Paris 8, Héctor Cavallero’s academic work deals with aesthetics and philosophy of music subjects, focusing mainly on temporal and material articulations within written music that deconstruct teleology in the 20th century.

As a composer, his works have been performed in contemporary music festivals in Latin America and Europe. In parallel to his musical training, he has studied visual arts and photography, participating in several exhibitions and publications.