Valle Sagrada (Pachamama de la Ciguapa)

A neon aura figure nests among a coconut palm nursery, syncretizing an exotic synthetic object with an endemic landscape.

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. Cast palm trunk husks, braided palm fronds, quipus, synthetic and human hair, llama and alpaca fur, floor resin, wall insulation foam, interior latex house paint, plastic funerary plants, dessicated tropical fruit are emboldened by a tropical, pregnant figure to embody our collective refuse as a site for procreative refuge.

The natural and man made materials composed along with the title- refer to the cultural translation between gendered geographies and spiritual traditions of Caribbean and Andean cultures.