Abstract

DE LIMA, Blanca. La nueva historia oficial en Venezuela y su expresión gráfica en espacios urbanos. Cultura representaciones soc [online]. 2011, vol.5, n.10, pp.107-136. ISSN 2007-8110.

The new official history in Venezuela and its graphical expression in urban spaces. The purpose of this text is to think over the new official Venezuelan history and its graphical expression in the urban spaces, taking as a starting point the thesis that we are facing a new historical culture since there is a new proposal to relate to the past, a new elaboration accompanied of new social agents and from new means, such as wall painting, which represents for the Venezuelan case a new way of assuming the practice of public history. It is assumed that the new official history walks in the opposite direction to the processes of appropriation of history along multiple groups and social actors; it denies the possibility of opening a discussion on the problematic of the country and the interpretations that mark Venezuela's history. The historical truth is defined from the sphere of power, and the way for researching or producing any historical discourse is to support the interpretive canon made official by the bolivariana socialist offer. The historian is compelled to interpret from a political commitment, linked to the contingencies of the bolivariano socialist project, which takes as a departing point the uniqueness of knowledge characteristic of Marxist thought. As for the artistic creation that extends the new history, it is intended to obtain a saturation tending to detonate attitudes that facilitate the control of the mass, departing from the construction of an urban network of messages that urge to follow the president and his decisions. The images would help to establish relations that will generate empathy with the historical socialist discourse. From an anthropologic perspective, they constitute an institutional resource that transmits a cultural heritage, and they might be understood as a resource to generate a cultural mutation destined to contribute to the creation of the new socialist man.

Keywords : historical culture; historical public memory; visual culture.