Artist Statement

Culture is an agreement to see the world through the same lens. What we hear, see, taste, and feel is in dialogue with the maps we’ve been given to navigate the world around us—maps containing so many words and metaphors, dragging their preconceived meanings across the land like tails. One might wonder how our experience of ourselves and our surroundings might change if we could escape the confines of this cultural map. What lies just beyond the borders of language and design, in the terra incognita of our selves?

I consider myself an artivist and creative storyteller — extending the boundaries of myself into unknown territory in the hopes that if I change my relationship with my own body, I may also help restore the bodies around me and the bodies of the landscape we inhabit.

I was raised in Bolivia and moved to New York for a Master's in Design and Urban Ecologies at Parsons in late August 2022. I was shocked by the subway. I looked at people looking down at their devices, rushing to work, scrolling, then rushing to get home. My cousin who lives in the city told me shortly after my arrival that his days consist of looking at his small screen in the morning, then his medium-sized screen throughout the day, then his large screen, and finally his small screen right before bed. I pledged to resist the device-heavy productivity ethos, yet a few months in, it became little more than a hum.

As a social anthropologist by formation, I understand that the central insight of this field is that the social world we exist in does not exist in an absolute sense. There is a choice to exist in the world differently, but the thing about culture is that when it’s there, we don’t know we’re in it. We lose the ability to listen. In the words of Cornell West, “We become too well adjusted to injustice.“

My work, intersecting poetry, somatic practice, and urban installation, creates liminal spaces where we deeply listen to culture and question its absoluteness. In listening with our whole selves, we create spaces of resistance where change might take root.

To me, experience design refers to creating temporary mental and physical structures, holding off a contemplative space against the pressures of habit. My projects consistently center on reclaiming the right to rest, privacy, and contemplation—to be “left but a little to ourselves” in a world where our every last minute is co-opted as financial resource by the technologies we use daily.

Spectactors are invited to participate in this act of joyful deviance.