ECCLESIASTÉS 1:2

Looking through to the Techno-State: The Environments of Domingo Álvarez

This paper was presented at the 2018 College Art Association conference on February 24, 2018 in the discussion "Experiments with Technology in Latin American Art: From the 1960s to the 1980s"

This research focuses on the overlooked work of Venezuelan urban planner and visual artist Domingo Alvarez, most active during the sixties and seventies. Credited with introducing the first multimedia performances and environments to Venezuelan art, Alvarez was part of an array of projects in which he collaborated with national scientific and urban planning departments, and other artist-architect groups which organized city-wide exhibitions. My research hones in on exhibition Minas y Petroleo (Mines and Petroleum), and the Monument to Venezuelan Aviation as exemplary of mobilizing these forces. The prior was a multi-media installation hall created for the Ministry of Mines and Hydrocarbons in which Alvarez construction room environments, both didactic and conceptual. From the use of real petroleum in a hall of mirrors, to the construction of the immersive environment “La Sala del Diamante,”(Hall of the Diamond), the project exposed the history of Venezuelan mining and petroleum in hopes to mobilize national sentiment. In the same vain, the Monument to Venezuelan Aviation (partially exhibited at the Center for Inter-American Relations in New York City, now the Americas Society), demonstrates Alvarez’s collaboration with a national industry embedded in the military and scientific advancement of the Venezuelan nation.