Futuro Imperfecto
- 3 mar
- 9 Min. de lectura
Sean Nesselrode Moncada
Miguel Braceli crosses borders. His multifaceted work engages performance, installation, video, educational outreach, print material, and sculpture, defying geographic and thematic limitations. For over a decade, he has been committed to an expansive vision of artmaking in which the categories of artist, spectator, and participant are constantly under negotiation. Much of this is in response to the geopolitical contexts of his native Venezuela, as well as of his adopted United States of America—two countries that have experienced profound transformations that have tested our definitions of democracy and society alike. In this polarized, sometimes disoriented era, Braceli’s work cuts through political noise to advocate for the epistemological and ethical importance of artistic practice in times of crisis.
Braceli’s early work is informed by his training as an architect at the Universidad Central de Venezuela (UCV, Central University of Venezuela), which fostered a keen interest in how public space is shaped and experienced. Área (Area, 2014) examines this with an attention to the political dynamics of the Plaza Caracas, a public square in the governmental heart of the capital city. For this work, Braceli issued an open call inviting members of the public to participate in a collective performance in the plaza. Over seventy people responded, and the resulting work mobilizes collective unity in the face of partisan division¹. In Área, the participants occupied the Plaza Caracas on an unexpectedly stormy afternoon, holding a long black textile that outlined the rectangular perimeter of the titular “area” [Fig. 1]. As rain poured, the group slowly processed into a new configuration, with the black band providing both a unifying link and a visual indicator of the changing position of the crowd. At the work’s conclusion, the participants organized themselves into a single, linear row—a clear refutation of their initial, oppositional arrangement—before exiting the plaza [Fig. 2].
Área is exemplary in Braceli’s oeuvre, as it transforms a space of contention into one of social cohesion and cooperation. In this respect, the site is crucial: the Plaza Caracas has been the frequent location of political rallies and social protest, particularly during the governments of Hugo Chávez (1999–2013) and Nicolás Maduro (2013–2026) ². Yet even prior to the Bolivarian Revolution, the Plaza Caracas occupied a critical place in the Venezuelan spatial imaginary. It is part of the Centro Simón Bolívar, an iconic complex known for its twin towers, designed by Cipriano Domínguez and inaugurated in 1954. Not only were thirty-two-story towers the tallest in the country at the time of their construction, but the entire complex is a modernist tour-de-force, known for its rigorous symmetry and multi-purpose footprint on the city ³. It is also indelibly linked with the dictatorship of Marco Pérez Jiménez (1950–1958), whose rule was defined by such grandiose urban projects ⁴. The Plaza Caracas is thus an inherently politicized space, and one that has become even more charged in the sharply divided Chavista era. Área proposes a corrective, in which members of the public define the shared plaza on their own terms, in an exercise of mutual engagement. Braceli activates and materializes a Lefebvrean philosophy of space, in which the physical experience of urban life is continuously mediated by the bodies and subjective experiences of those who inhabit it.⁵
For Braceli, the categories of art and artist are just as contingent as space, by no means fixed but rather open to debate. It is an ethos that builds upon Jacques Rancière’s theorization of relational art as a fundamental reconfiguration of social encounters and perceptions.⁶ In this respect, art is necessarily and unavoidably a political endeavor. As Braceli writes, “the spectator transformed into an actor can occupy a place in the distribution of both material and symbolic space. This is where art finds a place in politics.”⁷ Consider Banderas de Venezuela (Flags of Venezuela, 2015), which collapses the material and the symbolic to comment upon the dangers of nationalist binaries. Staged on the lawn of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo del Zulia (Museum of Contemporary Art of Zulia, or MACZUL), it consists of two individuals jointly raising an enormous flag with two poles [Fig. 3]. In this case, the flag is not the familiar tricolor of Venezuela, but rather a long sheet of plastic that reflects the sunlight. One of the flag bearers wears a red shirt and white pants, the other a blue shirt and black pants. As they struggle to hoist the flag, more people join in to help in various groupings, but with little success. The flag collapses, pulled down by its own weight and, more acutely, by the inability of the two groups to work in cooperation. Here, the symbolism of the blue and red shirts is unmistakably political, signaling the divide between political left and political right that has calcified into an unsustainable global order on the verge of collapse.
This is not to suggest that Banderas de Venezuela favors an equivalence of partisan stances. Braceli’s work is never so literal, and while the performance concerns Venezuelan nationalism, it focuses more on the social consequences of polarization upon definitions of national identity. There is an element of wry humor to the work, derived from the incongruous size of the titular flag and the futility of the efforts to raise it. The actions of the participants, who were part of an educational initiative undertaken by Braceli at MACZUL, are rendered both impotent and absurd, undone by the tension generated by two parties working against each other rather than in tandem. It is the flag—that symbol of national pride, here drained of all color and specificity as to function as a kind of placeholder—that ultimately suffers, with each side unable to uphold it without the other [Fig. 4]. Braceli endorses neither left nor right in his work. His politics is more expansive, concerned with the functions and dysfunctions of a democratic ecosystem as it degrades into authoritarian oppression.
That metaphor of red and blue, not as unitary political positions but as evidence of a society atomized into constituent factions, persists even as Braceli’s geographic and material repertoire has expanded. In 2020, he completed his MFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, widespread social protest against police brutality, and an acrimonious presidential election. In this moment of sociopolitical emergency, his work began to address the political polarization and radicalization seizing the United States, as if in delayed repetition of the Venezuelan experience. That year, he presented United in Democracy: Polarization is the Weapon for the Perpetuation of Power (2020) at the Source Theatre in Washington, DC. As part of this installation, Braceli projected his film Geopolitical Games onto the exterior windows of the theater, turning the building into a venue for artistic and political commentary [Fig. 5]. In the film, citizens and non-citizens divide into two teams and play an invented game in which they bounce inflated balls; one team bounces red balls, the other blue. The game grows increasingly hectic, and it ends in deflation—of both the balls themselves as the team members puncture them, and of the nationalist gamesmanship that they represent [Fig. 5]. Braceli invites viewers to imagine themselves as participants, and more potently to choose the team, if any, to which they would belong. In a political climate where the categories of citizen, non-citizen, American, patriot, and foreigner are rapidly shifting both rhetorically and legally, Geopolitical Games questions the ethics of horserace politics when the social and humanitarian stakes are so high. In doing so, it allows both audience and participants to perceive the absurdities and limitations of such an organization of society.
Far from merely illustrating the effects of political division upon social structures, Braceli means to use art itself to reshape those structures. As he puts it, art is a relational proposal that “populates the space it inhabits.”⁸ The artist thus occupies a crucial role as an educator, with the artwork serving as their medium. Working under this mission, Braceli expands the creation and distribution of artwork to include the body politic, offering a degree of improvisation and unpredictability that lends agency to each person who engages with it. He also, crucially, reframes art as a profoundly pedagogical tool. His public intervention Biblioteca abierta (Open Library, 2013–2016) imagined public space as a library without walls: as part of a national university strike in protest of low faculty wages, thousands of books were made available in the Plaza Cubierta (Covered Plaza) of the UCV, freely available to members of the public to take and read [Fig. 6]⁹. Amidst the famed modernist architecture of Carlos Raúl Villanueva and abstract artworks by Mateo Manaure and Jean Arp that adorn the campus, the books offered testimony of the immense public importance of the university as a site of knowledge. The artwork itself occupied an ephemeral, everchanging place—as the books itself, as the activation of the plaza, as the dissemination of knowledge in open but quiet defiance of governmental restrictions. By doing so, Braceli effectively reshaped the UCV itself, strengthening its ties to a public beyond the university walls at a moment of social confrontation.
“Schools must be naked,” Braceli writes, “all their walls demolished to keep their structure, leaving only what is essential. They would then be buildings without facades, fully exposed to reality.”¹⁰ Indeed, there is a radical democratic ethos that unites all of his initiatives, from his participatory performances in Venezuela to his establishment of the digital platform LA ESCUELA__ in partnership with Siemens Stiftung. The latter is an experimental, open-access hub that develops a variety of performances, pedagogical initiatives, scholarly articles, and interdisciplinary projects that promote an awareness of the arts throughout Latin America. Braceli refers to LA ESCUELA__ as “roving campus,”¹¹ and in many ways it is of a piece with his larger artistic project. He seeks to build connections and strengthen networks, not just within the arts but across the broader public, with an eye toward the power of the collective in relation to political authority.
To this end, Braceli’s recent turn to sculpture at once comments most directly and most obliquely upon the present political moment. In El perro se muerde la cola (The Dog Chasing its Tail, 2024), a flagpole is bent into a circular shape, doubling back against itself and attached to the wall with a plunger [Fig. 7]. The soaring eagle that crowns the flagpole nosedives towards the ground. In another untitled work (2026), the flagpole is precariously pinned in perpendicular position to the wall by two long cords, forming a bow and arrow that aims towards a painted red circle on the wall and yet cannot be released. In both works, the actual flag has disappeared, rendering the flagpole a mere object without a purpose—an empty signifier, emptier even than the flag of Banderas de Venezuela. It is up to the viewer to decipher any concrete meaning from either scenario, for Braceli withholds easy resolutions and evades purely partisan solutions. Rather, he defamiliarizes everyday spaces and objects to question the tribalism that dominates twenty-first-century geopolitics, which splits communities and societies into irreconcilable blocs.
Ours is a very imperfect future indeed, but Braceli gives tangible form to the intangible forces of authoritarianism and oppression that would seek to divide rather than unite. His is a fundamentally political art, not in the limited partisan sense that characterizes twenty-first-century geopolitics, but in its most humane and democratic iteration. As he writes, he is unwavering in his commitment to “emancipatory systems based on a social, environmental, and pedagogical approach to the land.”¹² That commitment amounts to nothing less than a transformative redefinition of the artwork, as a project that moves beyond categorical limitations to activate the viewer as a fully embodied, fully empowered social participant.
This text was commissioned by the Tulsa Artist Fellowship for the solo exhibition Miguel Braceli: Futuro Imperfecto, presented by the Tulsa Artist Fellowship and The Hulett Collection. Essay by Sean Nesselrode Moncada — Miguel Braceli: Futuro Imperfecto, Tulsa Artist Fellowship, 2026.
01 Miguel Braceli, “Área,” Miguel Braceli, 2014: https://www.miguelbraceli.com/area.
02 Regarding the politics of protest, territory, and conflict, see María Pilar García-Guadilla, “Territorialización de los conflictos sociopolíticos en una ciudad situada: guetos y feudos en Caracas,” Ciudad y Territorio Estudios Territoriales (CyTET) 35, nos. 136–37 (2003): 421–40.
03 See Henry Vicente Garrido, “Cipriano Domínguez: Arquitectura entre lo moderno y lo memorable,” Entre Rayas 84 (July–August 2010): 56–6.
04 Lisa Blackmore argues that the extensive building projects of Pérez Jiménez served a social function in that they screened the repressive actions of the dictatorship, thereby conditioning Venezuelan citizens to accept the veneer of modernity at face value. Lisa Blackmore, Spectacular Modernity: Dictatorship, Space, and Visuality, 1948–1958 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017).
05 Henri Lefebvre’s foundational theory that space is socially constructed and continuously mediated by its actors has deeply informed not just Braceli’s approach to art and pedagogy, but also a generation of architects, urban planners, and sociologists. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1991).
06 See especially Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London and New York: Continuum, 2004).
07 Miguel Braceli, “The Naked School,” MFA Thesis (Maryland Institute College of Art, 2020), 2.
08 Braceli, “The Naked School,” 2.
09 Miguel Braceli, “Biblioteca abierta,” Miguel Braceli, 2016: https://www.miguelbraceli.com/biblioteca-abierta
10 Braceli, “The Naked School,” 4.
11 “LA ESCUELA__: About,” LA ESCUELA__, 2018: https://laescuela.art/en/about.
12 Miguel Braceli, Artist Statement, 2026.
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