Featured Booth: A Two‑Artist Dialogue

Points of Convergence

• Petro‑Politics & Power: Balteo‑Yazbeck analyzes oil as a tool of geopolitical manipulation and propaganda; Alenso exposes the extractive violence and social instability caused by resource dependency. Shared: both reveal the global consequences of petroleum economies.
• Archival vs. Material Evidence: Balteo‑Yazbeck uses archives, documents, and historical artifacts to uncover hidden narratives; Alenso uses industrial debris and found infrastructure to expose extractive realities. Shared: both turn evidence into critique, transforming fact into form.
• Critique of Modernity: Balteo‑Yazbeck deconstructs how modernity and cultural diplomacy were shaped by Cold War oil power; Alenso shows the collapse of progress myths through decayed machinery and precarious systems. Shared: both dismantle the myth of progress tied to industrial and capitalist expansion.
• Venezuelan Context / Global Resonance: Balteo‑Yazbeck frames Venezuela as a geopolitical case study within global oil strategies; Alenso places Venezuela within global ecological and extractive crises. Shared: both root their practice in Venezuelan history while addressing universal conditions.

Conceptual Synergy. Together, Balteo‑Yazbeck and Alenso generate a critical dialogue on extractivism and power—one working through the discursive reconstruction of history, the other through embodied material realities. Their work exposes the ways systems of control—economic, political, and ecological—unravel societies and shape human experience. Their joint presentation creates a space where Cold War oil diplomacy meets contemporary extractive collapse; narrative meets matter; intellectual critique meets visceral urgency; and history meets aftermath. This shared terrain produces a powerful political ecology of art, making their pairing not just coherent but compellingly necessary.

— Helwing Villamizar