BACKROOM Caracas

After the experiences with Douz & Mille in Washington and then with Backroom NY—both curatorial platforms dedicated to promoting contemporary art—Rody Douzouglou, their curator and director, decided to continue promoting her actions in Caracas. So within a year she managed to launch BACKROOMCaracas, now in its new headquarters in Altamira, located in the northern area of the Venezuelan capital. It is place where Douzouglous office doubles as one of the two exhibition spaces. While BACKROOMCaracas has been offering a wide range of activities since it opened a year ago, it is in this new venue where it has recently started to organize exhibition by opening its doors to emerging authors like Maracaibo-based artists Valentina Alvarado, with her personal show entitled Navigation History, and José Perozo with the ongoing exhibition Reconverts, as well as Spanish artist Luis Pérez-Calvo with his show Here Comes the Plague. BACKROOMCaracas is essentially defined as a creative platform for the dissemination, promotion and reflection on contemporary art. Since its inception in 2013, it has presented several initiatives such as the development of editorial work, through its website: http://backroomprojects.com/, as well as workshops and residences with guest artists. The first one was presented last year with the participation of US artist Jarrod Beck who coordinated the exhibition project Balance, which resulted in a series of reflections on art and architecture and involved the participation of students and professors from the Department of Architecture and Urbanism (FAU) at the Universidad Central de Venezuela (UCV). BACKROOMCaracas is currently offering Inverse Project, a distance learning workshop taught by photographer Ángela Bonadies. The workshop consists of a call to students from the FAU to develop architectural projects based on photographs of existing structures rather than conceiving completely new ones on blueprints of for specific empty lots. It is about research that merges architecture and photography. Another important project that emerged from the collaboration entitled The Devil's Chair between BACKROOMCaracas and FAU-UCV was Superblock: A workshop taught by visual artist and filmmaker Mariana Rondon who, in collaboration with the architecture collective Adjkm, created an interactive installation whose reflection revolved around the relationship between intimate and social spaces through the image of one of the densely populated buildings that characterize Latin American modernity. Inverse Project and Superblock were presented within the context of the 2014 FAU Research Triennial entitled New World(s): The Reinvention of the Latin American City. Backroom, which literally means "back room," metaphorically suggests that its main objective is to achieve—from that position, from behind—ideal conditions that allow artists and creative thinkers in general to freely act, create and think in order to develop interesting projects. In addition to its director, Rody Douzouglou, BACKROOMCaracas is formed by visual artist Florence Alvarado; Lisa Blackmore, translator and researcher of visual culture; Gaëlle Smits, fashion designer and producer; Natasha Tiniacos, editor; and Carmen Alicia Di Pasquale, philosopher and graphic designer. According to this team "Our editorial approach answers to the permissions given in 'back rooms,' where freedoms are established and agreements reached with usually unintended words."