About Us
A platform for community, memory, cultural exchange, and creative connection.
EL CONSULADO
Founded in New York City in July 2025, EL CONSULADO is an artist-led nonprofit cultural organization that brings together artists, writers, curators, and communities to exchange knowledge and resources and develop projects across disciplines and geographies.
For years, Venezuelans living in the United States have had no access to consular or diplomatic services, contributing to a fragmented and often loosely organized Venezuelan community.
EL CONSULADO responds to that absence by reimagining the consulate through art—as a platform for community, memory, cultural exchange, and creative connection.
Context
Venezuela's cultural field has been fractured by migration, political rupture, and the erosion of institutions that once sustained artistic visibility, exchange, and continuity.
EL CONSULADO emerged in response to that fragmentation, but not with the intention of reconstructing a single cultural center. It takes as a point of departure the figure of the international Venezuelan — geographically displaced, yet not detached from culture — and understands dispersion itself as a condition from which new relationships can be formed.
Artists and communities can meet, separate, and reconnect across different cities, disciplines, institutions, and contexts. What emerges is not a fixed representation of Venezuelan identity, but a transnational network through which multiple practices and experiences can circulate while retaining their autonomy.
In this way, “Venezuelan art” does not simply seek to recover international visibility. It enters actively into the conversations of contemporary art from a transnational, autonomous, and post-institutional position.
Position
EL CONSULADO approaches cultural production through three interconnected principles that shape how the organization organizes, collaborates, and creates.
Individual Autonomy
Artistic practices enter EL CONSULADO without surrendering their independence to a collective identity or institutional agenda. Artists remain free to define their own positions, methods, relationships, and forms of participation.
Voluntary Cooperation
Collaboration emerges through choice rather than obligation. Artists, institutions, communities, collectors, supporters, and other participants contribute from different positions, combining knowledge and resources when shared interests make cooperation meaningful.
Post-Institutional Practice
EL CONSULADO does not reject institutions, but questions the assumption that cultural production must be organized around a centralized institutional authority. It works through distributed relationships, temporary formations, and direct cooperation while maintaining a critical distance from centralized and state power.
Founding Team
Take Part in EL CONSULADO
Participation takes many forms: membership, volunteering, collaboration, project sponsorship, partnerships, and other forms of support and cooperation.
Participation, Support & Collaboration
Enter the network through membership, contribute your time or expertise, support a project, or help create new connections between artists, communities, institutions, and resources.