[2022-2024]

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 a visual investigation into how, during the late twentieth century, beauty and militarism shaped

a national imaginary governed by binary ideals, excluding everything that disrupts those representations.

Patriotic symbols and iconographies discipline bodies and identities, producing defending soldiers in parallel

with beauty queens.

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Through the revision and intervention of archives and visual memory, the project traces the origins of these national ideals, assimilated by Venezuela and historically guided by the United States as an exporter of heteronormative models.