Morgue de Bello Monte

3d print

2 x 1 x 3,5 inches

2016

The Morgue de Bello Monte was originally conceived in the 1950’s as a social club owned by the rum company Pampero. In 1973, the social club, a colonial structure, was seized by the government and rather cynically turned into the city’s main mortuary. The building is located in the neighborhood of Bello Monte, where I grew up. As a child, I use to walk past it on my way to school, both frightened and thrilled by the uncanny presence of a building that housed the dead. The site has since become a symbol of the current political situation in Venezuela due to the rising death toll produced by crime and social tensions. The number of arriving corpses currently outpaces the morgue’s capacity, even as the state’s year-2000 plan to construct a larger morgue still fails to transpire. The piece recreates the Morgue de Bello Monte in miniature as an ash-white-colored 3D printed model. My intentions were to make a small monument to the memory of so many people who have died and passed through this building, many of them unidentified. Its tiny scale speaks to a monument-as- simulacrum through which life’s banality can be expressed, or to the projection of a fragile memory. The piece is presented on a pristine glass shelf jutting out from a wall, representing a thrust through history for recollection in modernity.