| | | Javier Jose Ceballos holds up a Venezuelan bill painted with the image of Venezuelan revolutionary heroine Luisa Cáceres de Arismendi. In the artist’s rendering, she is depicted cutting her hair in solidarity with the Iranian women who are today leading protests in their country. “Here we're playing with the idea of a revolutionary hero in the war [against Spain] for independence, a symbol that is universal here, to draw attention to the rebellion in Iran,” he explains. | | Money is only valuable because people trust it to be. And all these currencies have floating, ever-changing values. Our idea has always been to add value to this arbitrary perception of money, through art. - Javier Jose Ceballos | | Ceballos and his girlfriend, Paula Villamizar Guererro, both artists, fled their country in 2019. They are two of the more than 7 million Venezuelans who have fled since 2015 amid economic collapse and hyperinflation — inflation so bad that their country’s currency, the bolívar, has been rendered virtually worthless. Yet these two artists have found a way to survive off that currency nonetheless, by hand painting the colorful bills and, in the process, drawing attention to the global Venezuelan diaspora and to social movements around the world. They are also toying with the question of what makes money valuable. “Money, at the end of the day, is just paper,” Ceballos tells OZY. “Or numbers in a computer. Money is only valuable because people trust it to be. And all these currencies have floating, ever-changing values. Our idea has always been to add value to this arbitrary perception of money, through art.” |
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| | | | | | | | “Welcome to the Bolivarian Re-valuation Factory,” says Guererro, referencing the tongue-in-cheek moniker they use for their own home, in which nearly every surface is covered with art, large and small, all painted on Venezuelan currency. The name is a reference to the “Bolivarian Revolution'' of former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. Their work has focused on current events in the region and around the world: mass protests in Colombia last year, the Venezuelan migration, and social movements on the other side of the world in Hong Kong, Iran and Lebanon. | | Their current project documents migrants traversing the Darién Gap, the deadly jungle migration corridor between Colombia and Panama. | | “It’s like pop art,” says Ceballos, “but with current events. It’s almost a journalistic approach to contemporary art.” Their current project documents migrants traversing the Darién Gap, the deadly jungle migration corridor between Colombia and Panama, a topic that has made international headlines as northbound migration surges. Using images found on videos or photos posted to social media, WhatsApp groups or iconic images from journalists, Ceballos and Guererro transform into art the life-and-death struggles of the world’s most dangerous migration corridors, seeking to humanize migrants who might otherwise appear as statistics or nameless images throughout much of the world. “Venezuelans have fled to every corner of the world,” says Guererro. “And we are a living part of this story. We are documenting that journey, using the currencies of the countries they pass through, from Venezuela to the U.S. border.” They display a painting on a U.S. dollar of a Venezuelan being photographed after his arrival in the U.S. Another painting, on a Honduran lempira banknote, pictures a migrant caravan leaving Honduras. On a Mexican 20-peso bill, a depiction of a migrant camp. As Ceballos shares stories of deportations, arrests, persecution and victimization, he says, “It is ironic that money passes borders so much more easily than people, don’t you think?” |
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| | | | | | | | Ceballos and Guererro arrived in Bogotá, Colombia, in 2019, at the high point of tensions between Colombia and Venezuela. Both had studied painting and art in Táchira, Venezuela where they met as students. They were trying to survive by selling more traditional paintings in the streets, but that didn’t go well, says Ceballos. At the time, amid the massive Venezuelan exodus, it was very common to see vendors selling wallets or other items that had been made from ever-depreciating Venezuelan bolívars. That’s when it clicked for the couple that they could do something new, combining their art with the street-side trend of selling bolívars. | | The corner where we normally sold our work was taken over by police. We were just documenting what we saw, what we lived. - Javier Jose Ceballos | | “At first, we were doing pure popular art” of iconic characters from movies, TV shows, comics or politics, Ceballos explains. “That’s what sold, and we were trying to survive.” But over time, their style of documenting social movements emerged from the very experiences they were living. In 2019, and again in 2021, the street artists witnessed popular rebellion against a host of issues including tax reform, a failing 2016 peace plan and police brutality, as the largest protests in recent Colombian history exploded across the country. “The corner where we normally sold our work was taken over by police,” says Ceballos. “We were just documenting what we saw, what we lived.” As a brutal police crackdown ensued, their work began to feature riot police, protesters in the streets and political figures from their adopted country. “It was a transformative moment for our work,” says Ceballos, “But it also became a little dangerous for a Venezulean to be on the streets.” At the time, many politicians from Colombia’s ruling party tried to deflect responsibility for the popular uprising by blaming Venezuelan “infiltrators” and the government of Venezulean President Nicolás Maduro. Some Venezulean street musicians were proclaimed to be a "threat to public order" and were deported. Follow-up investigations by Colombian journalists revealed that those deported had not taken part in the protests, but rather were bystanders. Asked how Colombians respond when they see their political reality painted across Venezuelan bills, Ceballos says, “The reactions our work evokes are always very personal. But I think in the vast majority of cases, it was a very positive reaction.” He points out one exception, however. Colombian police are rarely amused by the images that are so bitingly satirical. |
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| | | | | | | | | | Earlier this year, the couple moved to Medellín, Colombia’s second-largest city, where they have expanded from street art into galleries and have started producing larger collage works that are also made from Venezuelan bills. | | We are documenting the ephemeral: the passing moments of life, social movements and the grand Venezuelan diaspora, which has become global. - Javier Jose Ceballos | | Though they hope to expand their presence in the world of galleries and fine art in Medellín, Ceballos and Guererro say that the core of their work will likely always be in the streets, where the work was born. “We are documenting the ephemeral: the passing moments of life, social movements and the grand Venezuelan diaspora, which has become global,” Ceballos says. If, along the way, he and Guererro can “humanize people struggling for justice and evoke a reaction from the public,” he says, “Well, that’s really the point of art, isn’t it?” “Unlike the currencies we use,” Guererro notes, “each work is unique.” |
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