Action performed in front of the Venezuelan Ministry of Education, Caracas, in 2017, after a protest at one of the capital’s Public Defense buildings against the Nicolas Maduro, the successor of the late Hugo Chaves, and his unfounded incarceration and killings of citizens protesting against the Socialist government domestic policies.
The first action was organized by Venezuelan audiovisual, Performance artist and poet, Érika Ordosgoitti (Caracas, 1980). In the first action, the artist was given a T-Shirt with the letter ‘E’, that, when combined with the other participant’s Te-Shirts spelled the sentence ‘It could have been me’, In the second act performed by the artist, the letter ‘E’ is appropriated to signify the word ‘Education’.
The title of the action is a play on the expression “THE UNIVERSITY OF THE STREET,” which recovers (or, better, comes close to designating a recovery of) one of the fundamental aspects of the process of humanization, which, in the case of Venezuela, became the process of factual dehumanization that is inherent in communist and socialist agendas, albeit not their discourse.
We are human because we manage to attribute meaning to the world. Then “they” taught this new generation how to make sense of the world and what sense we should make of it.
Ultimately, when we try to study the world, what we study is the way in which social discourse, the one which we are “permitted” to perceive, allows us to perceive that world.
Authoritative governments know that this mediating social discourse is made up of the set of texts constructed with symbols, images and objects and behaviors and reconstructed, always from a contemporaneity, such as the updating of historical social discourses that have managed to remain memorized, such as the propagation of the current social discourses that have managed to be perceived, and as the exhibition of social behaviors that have managed to become demonstrable.
Bolivarian University of Venezuela
Much is said about the Bolivarian University of Venezuela. For some, it was a place where “the warriors of the new battles to face against the hegemonies of the developed world.” For others, it is simply the worst university in the country.
To the regret of many, the Venezuelan educational system, particularly the higher education one, has been utterly dismantled in the last 20 years thanks to a lack of funding, an imposition of indoctrinating socialist sylabi, and the subsequent exodus of critical academic staff. On its part, the Bolivarian University is today an enclosure of obscurantism, a place where anti-academia, the denial of thought, knowledge, and research reign.