Ernesto Oroza, Installation view of “Archetype Vizcaya,” Courtesy, Vizcaya Museum and Gardens

If you’ve never been to the Vizcaya Museum & Gardens, you’re missing a slice of Miami and its history. It’s truly a strange and wonderful Oz, with 10 acres of gardens, a hardwood hammock and an Italianate villa that exposes a spectacular view of the bay from its front courtyard. But its the interior of the villa that is quirky, beautiful, weird and unique to the nation. Built by one of the Gilded Age’s moguls, James Deering, between 1914 and 1922, the entire mansion sports an artifice that is quite unlike anything else around — it was designed and decorated to look as though it had been in existence for centuries, like a real European villa would have been, with layers of decorative styles piled on top of each other. And all in over-the-top Baroque and Rococo versions. Could there be a better place to invite artists to interact?

So to start a second series of artistic interventions (in the past sound artist Gustavo Matamoros and Cristina Lei Rodriguez took part), Cuban-born Ernesto Oroza stepped into this surreal, recreated world and created “Archetype Vizcaya.”

This is a conceptual work, very much about the place and the experience more than an exhibit of concrete “new works.” Which is of course part of the point. During an introductory tour of the show, visitors were given maps highlighting some of the amazing elements that make up Vizcaya, as the artist talked about the tension between an “original” and what is appropriated and “fake.” Such a universal Miami theme; Vizcaya, like the broader landscape, became a place of invention and reinvention, of constant replacement of the “original” with the new. It’s all so blatant in this faux Italian mansion.

First off, Oroza was mesmerized by the floors — the marble, wood and terrazzo tile covering everything, sometimes all of them in the same room. Marble, he explained, is an ultimate example of a material that has been repeatedly invaded and changed by powerful forces, literally revealing that process in its marbled look. Again, a metaphor for Miami. Following the map, you discover these floors and other objects, or furniture, or art, that has also been tampered with one way or another. For instance, in the Breakfast Room (the decor here is that 19th-century faux Chinese look), we find a painting on the wall from the late 1600s. But when it was installed in the estate, it didn’t fill the wall, so the decorator had another painter add a second “scene” to the work — bizarre. There are tons of these oddities mapped out by Oroza.

The artist has left his own imprint in some plexiglass pieces in several rooms, with white silhouettes pasted on them that represent invasive plant species that have been brought to Miami. There is also a video room, where the Oroza has spliced together videos taken over the years at the villa, of weddings, concerts, parties — random people who have “intervened” throughout its history.

In fact it’s all a little hard to explain — you need to see it for yourself. It’s an eye-opening way to experience that eye-catching oasis.

“Archetype Vizcaya” at Vizcaya Museum & Gardens, through May 29; 3251 S. Miami Ave.; www.vizcayamuseum.org.