Veronica Bello
La 8va Isla | The 8th Island
2025-26
La 8va Isla (The 8th Island) is the artist’s meditation on memory, distance, and the imagined spaces that emerge from displacement. As a member of Venezuela’s ongoing diaspora, Bello examines the narratives constructed around places that no longer exist or are in the process of disappearing. This body of work takes its title from the historical bond between the Caribbean and the seven Canary Islands in Spain, proposing an eighth island that exists not in geography, but in longing.
The exhibition features textile works that hover between photography and painting, reconstructing fragmented landscapes drawn from the artist’s family archive. For Bello, the “eighth island” does not appear on maps. It is an imagined in-between, a space where two shores collapse into one, and where what was lost may be momentarily rebuilt.
Central to the work is Calado, a pulled-thread lace technique native to the Canary Islands and now a dying tradition. Bello applies Calado directly onto printed fabrics, removing and re-stitching threads to alter images from her archive. This act of destruction and reconstruction becomes both redaction and repair. Gaps in the textile interrupt the photograph, creating sites of speculation where memory falters and invention begins.
La 8va Isla transforms the gallery into a suspended geography of fabric and air. Here, loss and repair coexist, and diaspora becomes not only a condition of displacement, but a generative act of reconstruction.
Manipulated linen
16x13in
Manipulated linen
15x15in
Manipulated linen
24x16in
Manipulated linen
17x23in
Manipulated linen
16x9in
Manipulated linen
16x16in
Manipulated linen
16x9in
Manipulated linen
13x14in
(Framed) Manipulated linen
9x10in
Manipulated linen
26x13in