Unmeasured, detached, and isolated: The legitimation of a domesticated identity

Unmeasured, detached and isolated explores the lingering effects of colonialism on identity, behavior, and cultural perception through the lens of my personal experience as a Venezuelan immigrant in the United States. I investigate how colonial legacies—especially those codified through manuals of etiquette like Manuel Antonio Carreño’s Manual de Urbanidad y Buenas Maneras—continue to shape self-perception and societal expectations. Through video, sculpture, miniatures, and installation, I reconstruct a visual language that resists simplification and reclaims complexity. Engaging with the symbolic weight of tropical imagery, domestic spaces, and hybrid aesthetics, my work challenges Eurocentric frameworks and examines the figure of the migrant as a socially constructed “stranger.” By foregrounding opacity, disorder, and play, the thesis text and artwork open space for alternative ways of knowing and being—seeking not to resolve identity but to hold its contradictions. The project becomes both a critique of inherited norms and a speculative proposal for cultural reimagining