“The before and after”. From the ghetto city to the transformation of reality.
The construction of the University City of Caracas (1940/1960), a model of urban planning for the 21st century, the site par excellence of the so-called “synthesis of the major arts”, opened the door to the modernisation of our capital and influenced the city to become the recipient of large-scale public works of art, which became part of our everyday life. This also coincided with the creative boom of our plastic artists, many of whom had had the opportunity to study in the French capital, attracted by cubism, Dadaism, abstraction, constructivism and surrealism, among others, movements in vogue since the end of the second decade of the 20th century.
Unfortunately, our city, from the beginning of the 80s to the 90s, suffered an important process of deterioration, mainly due to the crisis that impacted the economy, as well as the migration of middle and upper middle class families from the west to the east and the development of office space in this area, abandoning the traditional areas surrounding the headquarters of the Public Powers and the bureaucracy, mostly located in the centre of the capital.
Caracas was not lived as a city, it was divided into ghettos, constituted by watertight compartments in the style of the American dream, where the inhabitants of the most privileged areas were confined to their small circle of daily life, without even crossing the Plaza Venezuela, the meeting point between its two extremes, to become the border between one side and the other; And those who, in order to move around, did so only in an adjacent way through the arteries of our Francisco Fajardo motorway, the same one that is taken when entering Caracas and wanting to leave it towards the outskirts.
This brought with it a great deterioration of the truly urban spaces, which were not destined for the urbanisations directly supervised by their own neighbourhood associations and their mayors, who, as representatives of small areas with large municipal incomes, could take direct care of their specific interests.
Thus it was that the meeting areas, squares, boulevards, open-air markets, the centre of monuments and public venues, were losing their decorum and we had to get used to seeing the dismantling of many pieces that ceased to embellish the spaces, to remind us of the harshness of the cities as centres for the collection of all kinds of scourge.
This situation could not be perpetuated. And even more so in the city of the red roofs, once the leading city of modernism in Latin America, degradation could not prevail, even less so when the destruction fell on the positive intention of creating spaces for the daily contemplation of art as a tribute to the people of Caracas and also to the creativity of the artists who also inhabited it.
Already as a cultural manager, while one afternoon I was returning home, driving along the Francisco Fajardo Highway at the Santa Cecilia distributor, the then shocking visual of the “Soto Sfere”, which had been placed next to it in 1996 in the Project “Love for my city”, with that crumbling aspect, of sporadic and almost loose bars, and worst of all, converted into a negative political icon by a black banner that crossed it from side to side, indicating the date of death of its author, Jesús Soto, wanting to extend it towards this one, generated in my spirit, the desire to make it be reborn as when a plant is watered so that its flower grows.
It was not an easy task. Until then, my work had been “ad internum” at the PDVSA La Estancia headquarters and interaction with the communities.
The first thing was to respect copyright. To work with the heirs of the kinetic master, who run the Foundation that bears his name. And then to rehabilitate the work and the area with a serious project and with the help of specialists.
In 2006, with subsequent extraordinary maintenance in 2010 and 2014, we succeeded. Today the piece is the clearest concretion of our utopia of the possible, a premise that has guided our cultural journey.
Therefore, the “before and after” of a recovered work goes beyond a curious photograph, and a way of maintaining our historical memory, it is more about the generation of a feeling, that of empowerment or identity, towards that which belongs to us as a society and for which we are willing to change our behavior towards the positive.
Therefore, I would like to show you the image of the two most important moments of our Caracas Sphere, and share the exacerbated fullness of satisfaction, joy, and pride that each unfolding of the curtain for the inaugurations and handovers of works produced in our recipients, the people of Caracas, and then in the whole country.
For its part, the Plaza Venezuela, adjacent to the extension by nature of our University, was conceived as a center for open-air works in an important format, to promote its distant visual and its invitation to visit it.
The Fountain designed by Master Santos Michelena, replacing two others in Caracas at the beginning of the last century, was originally placed in 1983, to be admired for its size and grandeur. We rehabilitated it in 2007, with the slogan “Back to the Plaza”, this from the hand of its original author, who with great emotion reviewed each step of our work, whose meticulousness reached the point of the restoration even of its pump area and its design in the style of Piet Mondrian. Led lights, colors and music were added to complement its heritage status.
It is surrounded by the “Abra Solar” by Alejandro Otero, with immense pieces or butterflies of the very new material for the time, aluminum, which sought to create an aeolian flutter. And the “Fisicromía an Homage to Don Andrés Bello” by Master Carlos Cruz Diez, which with repeated colors and lines achieved its incessant visual rhythm. We delivered the first one rehabilitated in 2006, from the joint elaboration with the author’s son Gil Otero and the approval of his daughter Mercedes, of each one of the butterflies that by repeating themselves in series until the infinity of our skies, look for the visual optical kinetic of the spectators. As it was unprecedented in our country and with national materials, we placed the first one in the gardens of the headquarters of the institution I managed and presided, PDVSA La Estancia.
We also consigned to the capital, in 2007, the “Fisicromía en Homenaje a Don Andrés Bello” by Carlos Cruz Diez, with the support of the extraordinary artist Nanín, from the Maestro’s group, who, together with the now retired but unique connoisseur of the “Cerámicas Carabobo” company’s superb machines, we were able to replicate the original tiles, which had fallen due to the exaggerated vibration generated by the unthinkable traffic of thousands of vehicles, now placed with more resistant technology and after more than 7 colour tests for each one, all of which allowed us to return to the Plaza the undulation of each one of its stripes.
The work “Pariata 1957”, of our great Omar Carreño, who also in the race for the movement without motor, wanted in that year, to produce it from the wind and that was destroyed with the years, we could recreate it of the direct hand of the author, whose design and calculations treasured in his memory, to incorporate in date 2011 to the today “Kinetic Complex outdoors pieces of art, the Plaza Venezuela”.
The following graphic representations can show the two stages of our rehabilitated space.
Once the bohemian and worldly center of Caracas, and then an enormous and invasive open market of the informal economy, where all kinds of vices had taken root, in 2005 we began a profound and comprehensive work of rehabilitation and requalification of the area, made up of a kilometer and a half and 27 transversals, today with absolute pedestrian privilege and destined for the connection of walkers between zones and with the surrounding road environment. Our promenade is now a meeting place for culture (almost 30 pieces of urban art), with the comfort of state-of-the-art furniture, the order of modern signposting, the absolute updating of all its public services, the remembrance in metal of its characters, the inclusion of people with different abilities, the sports machines, its areas of shade and shelter and the apparent improvised distribution of children’s games.
I would also like to tell you about the “Bosque Urbano El Porvenir”, with which in 2013 we integrated two vacant lots, one of which used to be the site of a children’s park and a police station; the other was fenced off by someone’s own initiative, although curiously enough it was made up of beautiful and well-tended plants. There, we did a thorough work of urban acupuncture, which identifies the almost non-existent unused urban voids in populated areas, to generate a change that expands in positive waves outwards from them. So, to serve the new communities of the newly constructed popular buildings that were growing at a rapid pace in Caracas, we brought into being an Urban Forest, whose greenery was accompanied by murals, public art and design pieces, beautiful landscaping, state-of-the-art signage and services, shaded and watered areas, updated police care headquarters, forest ranger house, children’s floor fountain areas, decks for relaxation, yoga and contemplation zones.
With the thesis of influencing the internal to extend the effects towards the general welfare, we managed to modify in 2013, an immense abandoned lot of land at the top of one of the most complex areas of the West of Greater Caracas, to change its use as an open-air dump for its intrinsic vocation and the desire of the surrounding communities, An immense Baseball Sports Complex, whose perimeter boundary allowed us to delineate and then venture into the neighborhood, a better quality of life for them, through art, children’s areas, play areas, murals, ambulatory, exercise areas, shaded areas, services and bleachers.
Another of our projects in 2014 was the Integral Rehabilitation of the Ornamental Courtyards of the “Generalísimo Francisco de Miranda Park” or “Parque del Este”, a masterful work of the Brazilian landscape designer Roberto Burle Max, accompanied by the Venezuelan by choice botanist John Stoddart, who guided us in the execution of a project absolutely in accordance with its origin and transcendence, which allows us to go towards the encounter of the surprises that its path presents us with. In this way, starting from the original cartography and plans of the Parque del Este, whose totality we digitalized as a gift to the city through the National Institute of Parks (INPARQUES), its supervisory body, we were able to recover, even using archaeological methods, the steps of each of its different stages.
The first of the three walled enclosures of the monument, to find the geysers, lagoons and fountains that protrude from the walls of vibrant and beautiful tiles, which we restored one by one; then the flowers and botanical arrangements of the pink courtyard, until we reached the high waterfalls that welcome us with great pomp and circumstance, and then face the yin and yan of its front gardens.
It was also interesting to return to the people of Caracas in 2012, a piece of its glittering 30’s, where the ruler Antonio Guzmán Blanco made our city Frenchified with the construction of theatres, squares, parks, and monuments. With a “picturesque” style was brought from Belgium, where it was built in 1883, the flower kiosk of the San Jacinto Market in Caracas, whose restoration was carried out by the Faculty of Forestry of the University of Los Andes, to make its filigree woodwork and its roofs shine again, now with 16 waters, as in its beginnings. Today, this gazebo adorns the gardens of “El Calvario Park”, for contemplation and use.
We had the opportunity in 2012 to literally save the “Casa Primavera” (from 1026), which was to be demolished for the construction of a local car parking. This building, which recalls the “Spring Pavilion” that inspired it, an icon, like the Eiffel Tower, of the Paris Fair of 1900, is one of the few reminders of our “art deco” Caracas, with whose presence we remember the transition from the quasi-agricultural city to the flourishing city of middle-class housing estates, which resulted from the boom in the country’s oil revenues.
Finally, for children, in 2005 we rehabilitated the Tilingo Theatre and its adjacent spaces, located in the vicinity of Plaza Venezuela, and endowed with the modernist architecture of the 1950s, when it was built, to return to the imagination of the children of Caracas the traditional tales and fables and take them by the hand to travel with Tío Tigre and Tío Conejo through the nooks and crannies of the memory of a Latin American country, Venezuela.
“The Before and After” is intended to be an instrument to excite, even the sceptic, about the certain possibility of a transforming change, because we are betting on it through planned work, through the execution, starting from the integral diagnosis of a serious and phased project, the incorporation of the best professionals in the most varied specialties, from sociologists to engineers, anthropologists and restorers, and above all, the call for participation, the empowerment of spaces for all, without exclusion, where the meeting is the main goal and continuing education the means to achieve it. Because recovered space is space taken for and by culture!
It is also our call for attention, for attachment, for care, which can only be achieved if we go hand in hand along a continuous path of active social exchange.
And since we were able to transform an innocuous reality into a virtuous and integrating one, with our drive, thanks to the acceptance of the recipients and their attachment to our work, which was of and for all, we went out to the slums, the most complex of our city and the rest of the country, and also to the interior, to bring general welfare to the length and breadth of the homeland. Therefore, I invite you to read my next article where I will show the “before and after” of the projects developed in other countries.