PATRIA

The book PATRIA is a moving account of the mourning of the father, of the questions of identity that it raises, and more generally of the history of Venezuela and its exiles since 2015, the date of the artist’s last trip to his native country.

“On June 9, 2020, I received a call.
On this side of the Atlantic, it must have been ten o'clock, yes, it must have been ten o'clock.
He's dead, she shouted at me. I found him dead. »

On June 9, 2020, artist Oleñka Carrasco learned through a video call that her father had died. The book Patria is the moving story of this mourning, of the identity questions it raises, and more generally of the history of Venezuela and its exiles since 2015, the date of the artist's last trip. in his native country.


A human experience par excellence, the confrontation with death is told here through the artistic re-appropriation of family archives; photographs, videos, audios… thousands of documents sent by WhatsApp on which the artist intervenes and creates works in themselves. In addition, Oleñka Carrasco takes shots of her place of life in France, the “loaned house”, clichés that she transforms, manipulates, alters by using a typewriter. The typewritten text dialogues with the images and seems, as the story unfolds, to reveal the mystery of these human lives while intensifying it.