Valeria Mancera

After leaving my home country, Venezuela, I was confronted with the impossibility of return. Through my drawings and paintings I explore my memory of sites and how I visualize forgotten or imagined places as I navigate my experience of geographical migration and its aftereffects. The construction of memory is central to my inquiries, but equally vital are the sites we have imagined or forgotten, and where images of these places are stored or housed. These memories of home breathe through my paintings. I feel the need to recapture this site through my daydreams. Sense of place and displacement hold both the real and the imaginary, and my practice depicts what this might look like. I fear that bit by bit, my home in Caracas will be lost in the mists of time, and it is this weight that I attempt to become free of through painting. My work is not about seeing or inventing, but about revealing a version of my reality through the distortions of my memory.