EL CONSULADO Debuts KIOSKO at NADA Miami 2025 — A Traveling Micro-Museum of the Venezuelan Diaspora
Outdoor Sculpture Garden, Ice Palace Studios · December 2–6, 2025
New York / Miami — November 26, 2025 — EL CONSULADO, a Venezuelan artist collective based in New York, is proud to debut KIOSKO, a modular sculptural installation and traveling micro-vitrine that reimagines the Venezuelan kiosk as a diasporic cultural device. KIOSKO will be presented in the outdoor sculpture garden of NADA Miami 2025 at Ice Palace Studios from December 2–6, 2025.
Conceived as EL CONSULADO’s first initiative beyond New York, KIOSKO responds directly to the cultural vacuum produced by Venezuela’s political collapse, mass migration, and the dissolution of its once-robust cultural institutions. As stated in the curatorial text by Michel Otayek, the installation acts as both an homage to the kiosks that anchor Venezuelan neighborhood life, and as a blueprint for a nomadic, community-centered cultural infrastructure that can be reassembled anywhere Venezuelans gather.
A Kiosk as a Memory, a Structure, and a Cultural Proposal
In Venezuela, kiosks—el kiosko de la esquina—have long been more than informal shops: they are social condensers, sites of trust, micro-territorial memory, and the place where neighborhood life unfolds. For Venezuelans across the world, the kiosk endures as a symbol of home, an architectural form entangled with the intimacy of daily life. As Otayek notes, in diaspora the kiosk becomes “a mnemonic device for a vanished urban intimacy,” a reminder of the warmth and cohesion many fled or lost.
With over eight million Venezuelans displaced since 2015, this mnemonic structure becomes a tool for re-anchoring cultural presence within a global condition of precarity. KIOSKO extends this function into the art fair: a traveling architecture for gathering, remembering, and circulating Venezuelan creativity.
A Portable Cultural Platform Across Borders
Designed as a lightweight, modular, radicant structure, KIOSKO brings together over 200 small-format works—prints, books, zines, vinyl records, cassettes, postcards, stickers, pins, and more—produced by 47 Venezuelan artists within and outside the country. The display echoes the material density of an urban kiosk, inviting visitors to browse objects that cross borders as easily as the artists who made them.
Within the context of an art fair, where works often circulate at prohibitive price points, KIOSKO presents a different proposition:
- affordable acquisitions
- porous authorship
- participation instead of consumption
Every purchase comes with a Certificate of Participation, underscoring that to acquire a work is to enter into the installation’s logic of shared cultural labor—not to own an object, but to join the work itself.
Rethinking Authorship and Cultural Labor
KIOSKO challenges the art-fair model centered on singular authorship and high-value objects. Instead, it foregrounds the relational ecology behind Venezuelan artistic production:
designers, editors, writers, printers, collaborators, documentarians, artisans, and cultural workers whose contributions rarely enter the spotlight.
By expanding the frame of who produces culture, KIOSKO offers a corrective to the infrastructural void left by Venezuela’s collapsed institutions. In a country where museums have deteriorated, exhibitions have become sporadic, and international visibility has nearly vanished, KIOSKO builds a self-determined, mobile, community-driven platform for visibility and exchange.
A Contemporary Echo of Critical Venezuelan Art Histories
The installation resonates with key moments in Venezuelan contemporary art, notably Meyer Vaisman’s 1993 Verde por fuera, roja por dentro, a reconstructed rancho that critically interrogated the contradictions of Venezuela’s petro-modernity. But unlike Vaisman’s work—which confronted an active cultural apparatus—KIOSKO speaks from within a vacuum: a moment when the state’s representational machinery has collapsed, leaving the diaspora to construct its own routes of circulation, solidarity, and presence.
A Kiosk Everywhere
In a global landscape where Venezuelan artists must craft improvised circuits of support, EL CONSULADO proposes KIOSKO as a nomadic structure of cultural presence—a kiosk that can appear anywhere Venezuelans live, gather, or imagine community.
A mobile site of exchange.
A gathering point set loose from place.
An everywhere kiosk.
EL CONSULADO — About
EL CONSULADO is an artist-run collective dedicated to supporting Venezuelan artistic practices through exhibitions, residencies, editorial projects, and community programs. Founded in response to the erasure of Venezuelan cultural presence abroad, the collective builds alternative infrastructures for visibility grounded in collaboration, mobility, and diasporic imagination.
