Valle Sagrada (La Ciguapa de Pachamama)

A coffee and soil cast figure nests among a coconut palm nursery, as a syncretic pieta between an exotic, synthetic mother and her endemic habitat. The natural and man made materials composed along with the title- refer to the translation between gendered geographies and spiritual traditions of Caribbean and Andean cultures.

Recalling liberation mythology retablos found in tropical terrains, the work considers the culture of procreation in the Americas- a complicated historical, political, and geographic context wherein conquering the wild landscape, reproductive bodies, and indigenous societies stem from a colonial Eurocentric legacy. Inhabiting its endemic environment, the fertility votive is made by combining intimate ephemera and environmental waste cast into a slurry of domestic construction materials. Monuments to the fertile survivors of man-made and natural disasters, the Mother Mold effigy figures bear the burdens of internalized structural violence made in and of our bodies, our landscape and our movement. Neon floor resin, wall insulation foam, interior latex house paint, mica powder, phosphorescent pigment, plastic funerary plants, tropical foliage, discarded plastic bags, wood beads, cockroach, anise, cumin, cinnamon, coriander, black beans, egg shells, coffee slurry, gardenia perfume bottle, Peruvian Straight hair weave, bamboo fiber, braided synthetic rope & Quipus from llama & alpaca fur are emboldened by a tropical, pregnant figure to embody our collective refuse as a site for procreative refuge.