Fabiola Ferrero
As Venezuela grapples with profound political and economic upheaval, photographer and journalist Fabiola Ferrero turns her lens toward the nation’s most enduring symbols: oil and beauty queens. In this episode, she reflects on her long-term research exploring how Venezuela’s rapid modernization in the second half of the 20th century—fueled by petroleum wealth—shaped a national identity built on fantasy and aspiration. Through her projects “I Can’t Hear the Birds” and “Reinas”, Ferrero examines the complicated legacy of the country’s “golden years”, tracing connections between extractive industries and beauty pageant culture as parallel pillars of collective memory.
Fabiola Ferrero was a 2023 – 2024 Fellow of the Institute for Ideas and Imagination.
Atelier is produced by the Columbia Global Paris Center, a Columbia University initiative housed at Reid Hall.
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.
