Julia Zurilla is a multimedia artist whose practice unfolds at the intersection of experimental video, installation, and visual poetry. Her work is an effective, process-based inquiry into memory and displacement. Drawing on family archives, obsolete formats such as 8mm film, digital video, photography, and generative text, she builds fragmented narratives that orbit between the intimate and the collective, the analog and the digital. Born in Caracas, she has lived in Miami, Florida, since late 2017. She holds a degree in Fine Arts and a Master’s in Contemporary Art Studies from IUESAPAR in Caracas, and since 2022 she has been part of the Laundromat Art Space residency program in Miami.
Recent grants and awards include The Ellies Cinematic Award (Oolite Arts, 2025); No Vacancy Public Art Award (City of Miami Beach, 2024); Miami Individual Artist Grants (Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, 2024, 2023); and the Corral & Cathers Artist Fund Grant (Coral Gables Community Foundation, 2023). In 2024 she was invited to develop a special project for the WOPHA Congress, co-presented by Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA) and Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM).
Her work has been showcased in international museums and institutions, including Galería de Arte Nacional (Venezuela); Coral Gables Museum; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo MAC Lima (Peru); Théâtre La Colonie (Paris); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas; Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation – CIFO (Miami); Museo de Bellas Artes (Venezuela); and Americas Society Art Gallery (New York). Her work is held in institutional collections such as Fundación Museos Nacionales (Venezuela); Colección Mercantil; ExxonMobil Art Collection; and Luciano Benetton Collection.
Tide of Memory / The Vortex
Large-scale video projection on transparent plastic, sound.Dimensions variable.
Tide of Memory is an immersive installation that explores memory as a fragile fissure. A monumental projection presents an overhead view of the ocean: a continuous current flows from one side of the image to the other. Within this continuity, a small circle opens like a vortex, revealing fragments of 8 mm home movies filmed during the golden age of vacation tourism in South Florida, when Miami was consolidating its status as the nation’s vacation capital and receiving new migratory waves after World War II.
This circular interruption functions as a fissure through which memory resurfaces. Minimal, everyday scenes contrast the intimacy of domestic images with the monumentality of the projected sea. Here, the ocean emerges as both an emotional archive and a metaphor for a city layered by migration, tourism, and urban transformation.
The projection is cast onto transparent plastic sheeting, a material commonly used for covering or protection, which here acquires symbolic weight: it wraps memory as something precious, yet never preserves it intact. The folds destabilize the clarity of the image, reminding us that every recollection is subject to forgetting and to the transformations of time.
Tide of Memory proposes memory as a form of silent resistance: a poetic counter – narrative to urban spectacle, vanishing coastlines, and an increasingly speculative future.
