MI HISTORIA

Gabriel Valles Sguerzi is a human rights activist, academically a computer engineer, in love with Art at 32, Venezuelan. He led “Chavez lies”, an information campaign that the Venezuelan student movement used in 2010, showing flyers and leaflets with real figures of different indexes (extreme poverty, built housing, salaries…) and “Hunger for the truth”, pressure campaign at the national level, where information on the health of the then President Hugo Chávez was required through hunger strikes. The intention was to know if he was still alive or not. For his actions in these movements, Gabriel was arrested several times and was branded by President Chavez as a "terrorist."

Already late Chavez and Nicolás Maduro in power in 2014, Gabriel Valles was in Bogotá, Colombia, studying at the Superior School of War where he received classes for civilians, and learned to identify human rights violations in conflict zones.

He was a member of the International Bureau of Victims organized by the UN, in the mediation of the armed conflict in Colombia, in addition to denouncing the presence of irregular groups in Venezuela favored by the Maduro government, reason enough for the interests involved in the armed conflict, Gabriel is arrested and handed over to the Venezuelan Intelligence Service and he is taken to prison, without an arrest warrant, without trial, without reason, for almost four years.

Begins…

He didn't know where they were taking him, nor did he know about the existence of that place, that basement under Plaza Venezuela, right in the center of Caracas, the Venezuelan capital.

Upon entering heavily guarded the building of the main headquarters of the Venezuelan intelligence service, he went down to the fifth floor of the basement (10 meters below), until he reached a double armored door. In the place there were many people taking photos and asking for their data, from professional cameras to cell phones. Then they undress him and take a path of six armored doors, two corridors, walls and white lights everywhere, as if it were a special vault, until you reach a 2 × 3 cell, “where the first thing you feel is the cold taking over your skin as if it were a jacket and a white light that penetrates the eyelids. ” At that time they give him a khaki uniform and do not answer any of his questions, the uncertainty may be of the most macabre psychological torture methods.

A space of two by three meters, where you were not allowed to know the time, you do not have access to sunlight or natural air, where humiliations, humiliation, interrogations, blows and much more ... is the order of the day , anytime. Your cell mate being a camera, which he watches at all times, every day, for years.

Inmates of La Tumba cannot have objects or do any type of activity, so Valles found a place for meditation.

“I was able to make a complete retrospective of my person, analyzing every moment of my life and the decisions that made me reach that site, analyzing in detail the reasons and course of my existence. I could realize that I had to do what made me happy, and that my most unique and most enjoyable moments have been when drawing and painting when I was little and in my teenage years. I realized that my life lies there, in art.

From that moment on, a pressure process began to obtain pencils, colors, paintings. This and other requests such as books, eating in a chair and knowing the time ended in a hunger strike that we did for 18 days, with the intention of humanizing the situation in there, this happened approximately one year after being detained. ”

All this, all the time, all the physical and psychological torture suffered in that basement, gave more than 60 works, including drawings and paintings that are presented mostly here, in this portfolio, where life is expressed in present unfair confinement, without rights, without human conditions, for political reasons.

Gabriel is currently studying art in Bogotá, in the workshop of the plastic artist Patricia Tavera, is part of the "EXODUS" Participatory Art project and promotes plastic arts class projects for Venezuelan migrant children in extreme poverty.