Ruins [Made in Venezuela]

I took these photographs in February 2026, but I am writing about them now, in August, because the longer I look at them, the less they seem to belong to a particular place. They could be almost anywhere in Venezuela. A railway tunnel abandoned before it became useful. A metro entrance leading nowhere. Concrete structures left behind after the money, the political will, or both disappeared. None of this is particularly unusual here anymore. That is precisely what bothers me. We have become so accustomed to unfinished public works that we barely register them as failures. We walk around them, photograph them, explore them on weekends, and eventually turn them into scenery. The absurd part is that many of these places were once presented as evidence of progress. Today, they are simply there.

There is something particularly Venezuelan about the way we interact with these ruins. We do not necessarily mourn them. We occupy them. We turn abandoned infrastructure into places for photographs, exploration, curiosity, and even recreation. I understand the impulse because I share it. I was there too, walking through spaces that were never supposed to exist in this condition. There is an undeniable attraction in seeing what remains after an ambitious project has been abandoned. The tunnels, the rails, the enormous concrete structures, the empty stations: they provoke curiosity because they allow us to enter a part of the country that was supposed to have a different future. But I also think there is something uncomfortable in the fact that our curiosity has become easier to maintain than our indignation.

That is where I think the problem becomes larger than the ruins themselves. A failed project does not become less failed because people eventually learn to live around it. Time does not transform corruption into heritage. An unfinished railway is still an unfinished railway, even when the landscape around it becomes beautiful. An abandoned station does not become less embarrassing because it provides an interesting background for photographs. And yet, social media has made this transformation remarkably easy. We can aestheticize almost anything. Decay becomes content. Abandonment becomes an adventure. A failed investment becomes an unusual location to visit on a Saturday morning. I am not saying people should stop exploring these places. I am saying we should be careful about what happens when fascination replaces memory, because once the original failure disappears from the conversation, the ruin becomes easier to accept.

Perhaps the most disturbing part is how comfortable we have become with pretending not to understand what we are seeing. We know these works cost money. We know they were announced, promoted, inaugurated in some cases, and surrounded by promises. We know that someone approved them, someone managed them, someone collected money, someone supervised them, and someone was supposed to finish them. We also know that Venezuela has lived for decades with corruption, political opportunism, institutional incompetence, and public resources treated as though they belonged to nobody. Yet we often behave as if the ruins appeared naturally, like geological formations. We call ourselves naive when convenient. We look away when looking becomes uncomfortable. Then years pass, the concrete deteriorates, the rails rust, vegetation takes over, and eventually we call the whole thing history.

That is why I called this post Ruins [Made in Venezuela]. Not because ruins are uniquely Venezuelan, but because the process that produces so many of ours is painfully familiar. What interests me is not simply the beauty of these places, although some of them are undeniably striking. It is the contradiction of living among the physical evidence of promises that were never fulfilled and somehow treating that evidence as ordinary. I photographed these places because I wanted to see them, but also because I wanted to remember what they actually are. They are not merely abandoned spaces waiting to be explored. They are public decisions made visible. They are money converted into concrete, steel, darkness, and silence. And perhaps the most Venezuelan thing about them is not that they were abandoned. It is that we learned how to live with them.