What defines a territory? A line, a memory, a belief?
In Maps of Belonging, artist Emilia Azcárate offers a radical reinterpretation of territory as a mutable, subjective, and deeply human concept. Through a body of work that blends elements of architecture, cartography, and spiritual symbolism, Azcárate invites us to reconsider borders—not as fixed divisions, but as markers of passage, transformation, and experience.
In this exhibition, territory transcends a mere portion of land delineated by political maps, evolving into a field of emotional, cultural, and existential belongings. The map ceases to be a tool of power and becomes a metaphor for the soul; architecture transforms from mere constructed form to human imprint, collective memory, and transcendental aspiration. Édouard Glissant argued for a “poetics of relation,” where identity is shaped not through fixed origins, but through encounters, movement, and entanglement. “Place,” he wrote, “is a passage, a transition, a crossroads.” Azcárate’s works operate precisely within this liminal zone—between the grid and the gesture, the known and the invisible—proposing space as a fluid and relational construct rather than a static container.
The Venezuelan artist situates her exploration between the echoes of the Old World—with its colonial structures, geometric rationalism, and classificatory obsessions—and the pulses of the New World, where the organic, the hybrid, and the spiritual demand prominence. It is at this intersection that her poetics emerge: an emotional archaeology of forms, a visual meditation on what makes us feel part of something—or excluded from it. Her visual language draws from the echoes of colonial architecture and rationalist systems – undoing their rigidity. In their place, she builds a visual syntax rooted in the sacred, the cyclical, and the intuitive. This is not erasure but transformation—a poetic excavation of memory and form that revels how we inhabit the world through resonance and sensation, rather than dominion.
As part of her ongoing research into symbolic systems and spatial histories, Azcárate integrates new works connected to the Dominican Republic. A key piece—a 'Mandala' inspired by the historic gold mine of Cotuí—evokes the spiritual resonance of a site marked by both abundance and extraction. Here, gold becomes not a commodity, but a medium for contemplation—where geometry, history, and metaphysical inquiry intersect. Also present is a subtle yet powerful reference to Anacaona, the Taíno poet and leader whose name means “golden flower.” In the interplay between this ancestral symbol and the legacy of the mine, Azcárate extends her poetics into a meditation on cycles of value, sacred matter, and the layered temporalities embedded within land and form.
American author and cultural critic, bell hooks, saw “home” not as a fixed site but as a space of becoming—where new modes of being and seeing emerge. “Home is that place which enables and promotes varied and everchanging perspectives,” she wrote. In Maps of Belonging, the idea of home is both fractured and expanded. It is reimagined not as an architectural form but as a psychic and spiritual territory, shaped by longing, rupture, and resilience.
By collapsing distinctions between map and memory, structure and spirit, Azcárate asks us to consider: Where do we belong, and what do we carry with us when we cross thresholds—of land, of self, of time?
