Helwing Villamizar, MACCSI Black, 2025
3D-printed sculpture in PLA (polylactic acid)
3 × 5 × 4 inches
Artist's Proof
This new sculptural work by Helwing Villamizar presents three small-scale 3D-printed models of the iconic Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas Sofía Ímber (MACCSI), each rendered in one of the reimagined national colors: gold (the mineral future), black (the oil sediment), and green (The bucolic in peril). Positioned as a triptych, the sculptures function as architectural miniatures and ideological fragments—three parallel readings of the same cultural institution. By stripping the building of functionality and reducing it to a symbolic object, the work reflects on the fragility of cultural infrastructure in Venezuela: how museums operate, fail to operate, or remain suspended between past ambition and present paralysis. Within the Inoperable Cities series, the MACCSI Triptych becomes a meditation on memory, extraction, and the stalled modernities that shaped Caracas. The artist’s sculptural work revolves solely around this singular Brutalist edifice—the MACCSI (its last two initials stripped under chavismo, erasing the name of its founding cultural director, Sofía Ímber). Villamizar reframes the museum not as a functioning civic space but as a relic circulating across diasporic imagination, carrying the contradictions of a nation built on resources, ruin, and unrealized futures.