Coda: An Impulse toward Potentiality

The coda, “An Impulse toward Potentiality,” highlights examples from performance art, visual art, and among Venezuelan people both inside and outside the country that imagine a certain futurity that escapes the boundaries established by the spectral gaze of the country’s distant and recent revolutionary past. It introduces, in the form of vignettes, the words of a worker in a women-run soup kitchen in Caracas, quotes from an article on the country’s #YoTeCreo movement, and installations and performance art by Ana Alenso, Violette Bule, and Adriana Rondón-Rivero. The coda argues that these works hint at a future in the making that will not be disciplined into form or meaning by either the stale discourse of an epic past that has run its course, or the dystopian insistence that in Venezuela there is nothing left but ruins.