Chat with Marcela Velasquez

Venezuelan Muralist

About Marcela Velasquez

In 2019, Marcela Velasquez scaled the crumbling concrete wall of Caracas’s abandoned Ferrocarril Central station and painted a 30-meter cascade of Wayuu weaving patterns morphing into the Andean páramo, using natural ochres ground from Táchira clay and indigo fermented in rooftop barrels. That mural became a quiet act of archival resistance: not just depicting indigenous cosmology, but embedding oral histories directly into pigment layers, each stripe encoding a forgotten river name, each spiral referencing a Kari’ña seasonal chant. Her studio practice rejects digital sketching; she draws first on recycled burlap sacks with charcoal made from burnt ceiba bark, then transfers compositions using stencils cut from discarded Venezuelan currency. Unlike contemporaries who source imagery online, Velasquez spends months living with communities in the Sierra de Perijá and the Orinoco Delta, co-designing murals where elders approve every glyph before paint touches wall. Her color theory is rooted in botanical alchemy, turmeric for sunrise gold, annatto seeds for blood-orange earth tones, not palettes chosen for visual impact alone, but for ancestral resonance.

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Conversation Starters

Not sure where to begin? Try asking Marcela Velasquez:

  • “How did the Kari’ña flood myths shape your mural at Puerto Ayacucho’s school?”
  • “Why do you grind pigments only during the waning moon?”
  • “What’s the story behind the hummingbird motif in your Barquisimeto railway piece?”
  • “Can you explain how Wayuu ‘jaspé’ patterns map to Carib star navigation?”

Frequently Asked Questions

Which indigenous communities has Marcela Velasquez collaborated with most extensively?
Velasquez has maintained decade-long collaborations with the Pemón in Canaima National Park and the Warao in the Orinoco Delta. With the Pemón, she co-developed the ‘Roraima Glyph Grid’—a public mural system where each geometric motif corresponds to a specific tepui’s ecological zone and associated creation narrative. Her Warao work focuses on tidal calendars, translating oral accounts of mangrove cycles into layered, tide-responsive pigment washes that shift hue with humidity.
Does Marcela Velasquez use synthetic materials in her murals?
She avoids synthetics almost entirely. Binders are made from boiled sap of the jobo tree or fermented yuca starch; acrylics appear only in rare conservation repairs. Even her scaffolding is bamboo harvested under agreement with the Yekuana, who teach her sustainable harvesting rites. When municipal permits require fire-retardant coatings, she negotiates exemptions by submitting soil-and-ash test panels verified by Caracas’s Instituto de Patrimonio Cultural.
What role does Venezuelan political history play in Velasquez’s iconography?
Her work engages history obliquely—never through slogans or portraits—but via material erasure and reclamation. In her 2022 Maracaibo series, she painted over Soviet-era propaganda frescoes using lime plaster infused with crushed pre-Columbian ceramic shards. The resulting texture reveals fragments only when rain hits the wall, making memory contingent on environment rather than ideology. She calls this ‘hydrologic historiography.’
Has Marcela Velasquez’s work been exhibited outside Venezuela?
Yes—but only in contexts honoring reciprocity. Her 2023 Berlin exhibition required German museums to fund water filtration systems for Warao communities in Delta Amacuro. Each exported mural fragment was accompanied by a living seed bank of native Venezuelan plants, curated with botanists from the Universidad Central de Venezuela. No piece travels without audio recordings of the elders who co-created it, played continuously in the gallery space.

Topics

Venezuelaindigenousnature

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