Education is at the heart of Miguel Braceli’s collaborative and boundary-blurring practice. The Central University of Venezuela campus, where Braceli studied Architectural Design, readily integrates art and architecture. It reflects Caracas, a city once invested in public art and architecture with artists such as Alejandro Otero and Gego providing the backdrop for Braceli’s creative evolution. It is appropriate that art and performance grew from Braceli’s architecture teachings. He and his students developed creative solutions to activate public spaces— experimenting until the human body, and its ability to perform in situ, became a central medium of expression.  Taking inspiration from Latin American art collectives, and the performances and interventions of artists such as Lygia Clark and Diego Barboza, Braceli began creating moments and spaces for exchange. Using poetic gestures of movement in public space and highlighting the transformative possibilities of education Braceli responds to his home country’s socio-political and economic crisis. 

In 2018, Braceli won a Fulbright scholarship and relocated to the United States to attend the Maryland Institute College of Art. Today, as an artist living in New York, Braceli collaborates with educational institutions to instigate social activations.  Here Lies a Flag (2021) is a site-responsive artwork in collaboration with New Rochelle High School students. Performed on a green field, Braceli gave expansive lengths of white fabric to students to collectively reshape using their bodies before ceremoniously burying it. Braceli uses this soft intervention to question concepts of borders, migration and belonging. The action’s impermanence embraced chance, existing long-term as photo and video documentation. In 2021, Braceli also cofounded artist-run platform LA ESCUELA with international non-profit Siemens Stiftung. Focused on Latin America and its diaspora, the platform is predicated on the concept of radical learning, offering alternative systems and content through workshops, readings, and talks, and facilitating experimental community-based projects. 

In 2023, during his Foundation Residency, Braceli began research for a participatory project to develop Miami’s water infrastructures. An architectural system “of survival”, Braceli aims to use the city’s complex relationship with water—as a resource and impending flood threat—to address gentrification, displacement, and migration within the greater “Latinx” experience. Further advancing his practice, Braceli also began activating the material used in past performances to create paintings, drawings, and sculptures, to serve as descriptors of collective actions. Commissioned by the NYC Percent for Art Program Miguel Braceli is developing a public artwork for the Staten Island Tompkinsville pier, which will give his ordinarily ephemeral artwork, permanence.