NEO MONUMENTO2025
During my childhood in Venezuela, the sculptures of Francisco Narváez were part of the landscape through which I learned to see my country. His figures embodied the idea of a nation proud of its people and identity, capable of transforming the human body into a symbol of collective dignity. Today, these monuments remain as remnants of a profoundly transformed country, where many of the promises they once represented seem to have fractured.
As a Venezuelan artist living in Barcelona, I began to wonder, from a distance, what kind of monuments we would build today. What happens to the symbols we inherit when the world they represented no longer exists? And how do we preserve a sense of identity when we are no longer physically connected to the land where it was formed?
Neo Monumento emerges from these questions. Inspired by the sculptural legacy of Francisco Narváez, the project reconsiders the meaning of monuments from the perspective of distance, displacement, and belonging. Through constructed photographic compositions, it explores new ways of representing memory, identity, and the possibility of imagining a collective future.
Created in collaboration with Sam, a young migrant from the island of Guadeloupe, the project brings together two distinct experiences connected by a shared Caribbean memory. Our encounter opened a dialogue between different territories and personal histories, revealing a common understanding of the Caribbean as something that extends beyond geographical borders. It remains alive in the bodies, affections, and memories of those who inhabit it, remember it, and continue to expand it.
The sea, stones, shells, flowers, and fruits become fragments of this shared emotional geography. Rather than functioning as decorative elements, these materials carry symbolic meanings and become instruments through which ideas of origin, transformation, memory, and belonging take shape. The body, in turn, becomes a territory in itself: a place where inherited histories, personal experiences, and new identities coexist.
While traditional monuments were conceived to preserve the past in stone, Neo Monumento imagines living monuments. Bodies that do not glorify power or commemorate heroes, but embody identities in constant transformation. Monuments of flesh and bone that exist as long as they breathe, love, remain, migrate, and build new forms of belonging. Within them, time ceases to be a fixed line and becomes a space where memory, the present, and possibility coexist.
The project also reflects on the relationship between the permanence traditionally associated with monuments and the fluid nature of identity. What we carry from our origins is never entirely fixed. It changes as we move, encounter others, and create new connections. In this sense, the monument becomes less an object to be preserved and more an ongoing process of construction.
At a time dominated by narratives of loss, displacement, and ruin, Neo Monumento chooses to explore another possibility: creating new images rooted in pride, affection, and optimism. It does not seek to deny the wounds of a fractured land, but to begin with them and ask what symbols we are capable of building when those we have inherited are no longer enough to represent us.
Perhaps the monuments of the present are no longer erected simply to remember what we once were, but to give form to what we may yet become.
For any acquisition inquiries, please contact Juliana Sorondo at juliana@julianasorondo.com