12/02/2025
Árbol de Aceite 🏴🇻🇪 by and Letra Mu**ta, is a limited-edition archival collection depicts Cabimas, a Venezuelan oil city whose racialized history of oil extraction has had a lasting impact on the local community.
The box contains an image-text fold-out, giclées, silkscreens, and a sample of oil (the same that was used for printing). It also includes a hard drive with a video, alongside a mobile device for viewing. Similar to pigments floating in water before marbling paper, crude petroleum floats on the surface of Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela and transfers to its people, to the food they consume, and to all surfaces that surround them.
In the context of changing U.S.–Venezuela oil ties, this work questions the dynamics defining future geopolitics, migration, and the significance of the catholic Black saint, San Benito.
In the artist’s own words: “Photography itself contributed greatly to the exoticization of people during imperial times, even in the representations of the current crisis; people’s suffering is documented to be exhibited as a novelty instead of a document for accountability. I want our realities to be taken seriously.”
Ronald Pizzoferrato (B. Caracas, 1988) is an artist and photographer based in Switzerland. His Afro-Caribbean identity informs his artistic research, with a focus on documenting the social and cultural realities of his native Venezuela, engaging global issues of identity, race, and violence. He holds a Master of Arts in Design, specializing in Trends & Identity at the Zurich University of Arts. He is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Bern’s Studies in the Arts (SINTA), with a research focus on digitization, migration, digital humanities, and decolonization.
Photos of Cabimas , photos for this post , fabrication , design and printing / currently exhibited / exhibit co-curated with Jenna Hamed.
