About

I was born onto stages. My first paid work was in front of a camera, and my childhood was the Latin music of 1990s Caracas: the bars and concerts, the nightclubs, the parties of my father and the musicians he played with. I sang and played viola in El Sistema, in the San Agustín núcleo, and stood as a soloist on the stage of the Teresa Carreño. I grew up performing for adults, and then I got too old for it. The world that raised me let me go, and for years I tried to understand why I never found my way back in.

When I arrived in Portugal in 2003 I kept doing what I had always done to belong: I performed, and I joined things. I sang with the Pequenos Cantores do Estoril and was admitted by public audition to the National Conservatory in Lisbon, in the tenor class, where I studied for a year. I joined a youth reading club that performed stories for hospital patients, and wrote a play for it, O Telescópio na Casa da Lua. I painted four azulejo tiles on Article 21 of the Declaration of Human Rights for a mural by the artist Françoise Schein, still on a wall in Alcabideche.

My final degree project, Internércia (2012), was a forty-eight-hour performance about the way we perform ourselves online. I made it in an altered state, sure only that it had to be tied to Debord, a book I had read half of. Years later I saw what I had actually built: a self-portrait of the child the spectacle discarded, watching himself through the next spectacle, YouTube. I had spent years asking how the society of the spectacle shapes a society. I had never asked how it shaped me. I make the work first and understand it later.

For five years I moderated YouTube for its Spanish-language market. I had a feed the algorithm did not choose for me, an unfiltered view of what people make when they want to be seen, from every position at once. I stopped seeing topics and started seeing patterns. I learned that the truth of a video is almost never its subject. The truth is that the video exists at all: who made it, why, and what they gain by it. The subject feeds the business model. The intention is where the truth lives.

The work continues Internércia by turning inward. I build AI agents fed with my own life, dream journals, biography, a cloned voice, until they argue like me. Coro Interno puts six of those voices in a chamber the visitor cannot leave. Cromática Diaspórica y Arrecha cuts a flag into fragments until it becomes a map of a country I no longer live in. The material is always me. I do not tell anything I have not lived first.