Mercedes Plazola

PROPORCIÓN ÁUREA

This project reflects on memory, distance, and belonging through the image of Venezuela structured by the golden ratio. Here, the spiral is not treated as decorative geometry, but as a system historically associated with harmony, proportion, and ideal order.

By laying this classical framework over a traditional Venezuelan landscape, the piece quietly questions who defines balance, and how notions of perfection sit against lived instability.

The spiral expands across the territory in a motion that suggests both growth and dispersal. Its curve evokes movement that is never linear: departure and return, expansion and contraction. The golden ratio becomes a metaphor for migration and diasporic identity.

Presented as a postcard, the work adopts the language of correspondence, something sent across distance, intimate yet public. One side holds the verdant aerial view of the country, measured and contained within a proportional grid. The other carries a fragment from Alma Llanera, often described as Venezuela’s second anthem.

The lyric speaks of shipwreck and return, of a body that,
even in rupture, longs for its point of origin. In the context of Venezuela’s ongoing political and social turmoil, marked
by displacement and exile, these words resonate with particular urgency.

The work articulates a desire not simply for territory, but for belonging. In overlaying an idealised system of proportion onto a nation shaped by upheaval, the work does not claim harmony. Instead, it stages a tension between measured order and lived complexity. The postcard becomes a quiet assertion that identity, like the spiral, is structured by its beginnings.

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