‘I woke up on Saturday at 2:00 am because I felt my door shaking and planes flying,’ artist Francisca Sosa López tells Ocula. ‘I thought I had some kind of hearing issue because I was incredulous to think that we were being bombed. The first text I got about a bomb going off, I realised I was not dreaming.’
López was one of millions in Venezuela’s capital city Caracas when it was bombed by the United States Armed Forces on Saturday, as they forcibly removed longtime leader Nicolás Maduro from power, along with his wife Cilia Flores.
López, who is based primarily in London, is one of 8 million Venezuelan nationals who have left the country since Maduro came to power in 2013.
‘I know my job is about creativity and imagination,’ López says. ‘But if I am honest, we’ve been so limited and so discouraged for so long that it is hard to imagine my country as free and what that would mean.’
She notes the enormous challenges for Venezuelan artists, with censorship, fear of retaliation, and a lack of shipping access prompting them to live and work abroad. In her work The Million(s) Bag Project (2020–ongoing), described as a ‘lifelong daily performance’, López draws one bag for each émigré to represent the decision of what one must take as they leave their home country.
