I remember my family gathered in front of the television, watching the opening of Miss Venezuela or the Independence Day parade on July 5th. Everyone watching. Weapons, crowns, soldiers, beauty queens. As a queer child, these figures were never role models; I was trying to understand who I was among those idealized bodies. A military society, sometimes with guns, sometimes with high heels.

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Dead Homeland is an artistic research project that examines how beauty and strength shaped national ideals in Venezuela during the second half of the twentieth century. These ideals operate as forms of symbolic and corrective violence that regulate bodies and desire. This cisheteronationalist narrative naturalizes beauty and strength as part of a “national genetics,” where the beauty queen and the soldier emerge as aspirational figures: trained bodies, uniforms, parades, and disciplinary codes that function as aesthetics of control. Through the review and intervention of press and television archives, the reinterpretation of political propaganda, and the production of queer staged photographs, the project confronts these imaginaries and their ties to U.S. visual regimes, exposing how dissident bodies remain systematically erased and persecuted.