VCUarts The Anderson is pleased to present Parakupá Vená / Fall From the Highest Point, an installation from Mariana Parisca on view from September 15 through 25. Mariana is a 2020 Sculpture + Extended Media Studies MFA graduate whose culminating thesis exhibition at The Anderson was postponed in Spring 2020 due to COVID-19.
Join us at the gallery on Friday, September 18 when Mariana will be present from 12 to 5pm. Physical distancing and face masks required.
Mariana will lead a virtual tour of the exhibition at 8pm on Thursday, September 24 via Instagram Live (@vcuartstheanderson).
This exhibition is a situated screening of Parakupá Vená / Fall From the Highest Point in which video and audio loops become embodied into sculptures. The International Monetary Fund speculated that the Venezuelan Bolivar would reach 10,000,000% inflation by the end of 2019, and it did. I have been buying Bolivars to question the economic rationality that limits our social relations. What caused Venezuela’s drastic economic decline? I look at the images n the bills through a microscope. Through this looking, colonial images of the land regain their material infinity. Since the land was named Venezuela, the project has been about accumulating the land into abstracted wealth. With oil, we ultimately outran ourselves. In this steep devaluation of a nation, I consider Parakupá Vená, the tallest waterfall in the world, and wonder, “what is Venezuela really?” Value exists beyond the collapse of the global hierarchical structures of colonialism, neoliberalism, and abstracted polarized political ideologies, I know it.
Mariana Parisca
In spring 2020, Mariana and Chase Westfall, Anderson Director and Curator of Student Exhibitions, discussed Mariana’s practice, the power of belief, and the effects and conditions of global neoliberal capitalism. To learn more and read the PDF of the conversation, click here.