“Memoria Viva”

PHOTO LONDON x NIKON EMERGING PHOTOGRAPHER AWARD WINNER.

For the occasion of Photo London 2025, Sorondo and BETA Contemporary, both based in Barcelona, collaborate to present “Memoria viva”, an investigation into the cultural expressions from the region of Barlovento and other surrounding towns in the State of Miranda, Venezuela. As its name suggests “Memoria viva” establishes dialogues amongst the nuances of cultural syncretism, revealing how the transmission and reinterpretation of traditions maintain people connected to their ancestry and the history of a country. Featuring the series of “Curiepe” (2025) by Silvana Trevale and “El Mampulorio” (2025) by Gabriel Pinto, both Venezuelan photographers aim to create documents that honor custodians of traditions, that highlight the intergenerational relationships these traditions inspire, and that enable a potential reconciliation between these cultural expressions with the living memory of Venezuelans.

Whilst Trevale is based internationally, she attempts to record current moments of Venezuelan identity, either within the country or in the nation’s diaspora, to recover a “sense of place”, a concept mentioned by Annateresa Fabris (2000, pp. 88) in which “...A nation is a system of cultural representation, as a community that thinks itself, made out of stories, memories and images”. Pinto, who is based in the country, begins by investigating the ancestral knowledge in local oral traditions and reinterprets these into tangible objects of analysis, thus contributing towards a potential imaginarium of popular culture. Both works depict the celebration of rites of passage through the traditional spiritual beliefs of Venezuela’s afro legacy.

In “Curiepe” (2025) Trevale focuses on ceremonies and key fgures that are signifcant to this town, including the celebration of a wedding, a childbirth Memoria Viva Victoria Maldonado, Curator and Cultural manager aided by doulas, “El entierro de la Sardina” at the end of carnival, and lastly, “La festa de San Juan” in honor of their patron saint, perhaps the most prominent of their celebrations. The people of Curiepe constructed very autochthonous celebrations from the syncretism between the imposed Catholic religion and the spiritual customs from the many African nations brought as slaves to Venezuela due to Spanish colonization. This syncretism is also present in the adoption of art forms such as percussion music, dancing and singing, all of which hold an essential role in the celebrations of Curiepe and beyond, possibly being one of the most promoted and widespread elements of the afro Venezuelan cultural heritage.

Also connected to this legacy are the worship of the land and the belief that the soul returns to Earth. In “El Mampulorio” (2025), Pinto draws from the experiences of individuals in the towns of El Clavo and Mendoza in which they describe a ritual where family and friends sing farewell to a deceased child. In this symbolic sendoff to the spiritual plane, the child will meet their ancestors and then become a guardian angel of their family’s land (Pinto, 2025). Sometimes described as the fight of an angel, the belief of the soul’s transcendence into the fgure of an angel is an afro catholic syncretism that at the same time, contrasts the typically somber occasion of a funeral with a moment of celebration of life (Pinto, 2025).

Through “Memoria viva” Trevale and Pinto strive to contribute towards the living memory of Venezuelans; in documenting and disseminating different aspects of Venezuelan identity they maintain culture and history relevant to the generations that follow.

Victoria Maldonado, Curator and Cultural manager