Curatorial Practice > Galvanized Suns

Ana Luisa Bernárdez Notz is an interdisciplinary artist based in Toronto. She holds a BFA from OCAD University, and was the 2020 OCAD U Photography Program Medal Winner. Her practice is largely influenced by the ongoing Venezuelan migrant and refugee crisis, and by her own positionality and lived experience within it. Ana Luisa is a member of Colectivo Satelital, a collective of Venezuelan creatives based in Toronto.

"Un espacio suspendido" is a VR environment in which I recreated my grandmother’s bedroom in Caracas. The room floats like an island on a body of water, pointing both to the Venezuelan-Caribbean coastline where I grew up in, as well as to the (in)accessibility of this specific room, which is only possible through memories and images. It includes embedded family photographs, home movies from my childhood, and furniture that was modelled and textured referencing photographs from my personal family archive. This space exists in a limbo state physically and psychologically for both of us: I now live in Canada, and she was displaced to a nursing home in 2018. Being physically unable to document this space, I used this digital medium to memorialize and immortalize it, with the hopes of adding to my family history as we navigate the current Venezuelan crisis, which keeps us all divided across borders.