Yemaya (Bermuda Triangle)

Materials: Guatemalan serape fabric, alpaca & llama quipus, braided bamboo fiber, cotton balls, nylon rope, iridescent film, Cuban “colonia” perfume bottle, turquoise powder, salt, coconut powder, white quinoa, floor resin,wall insulation foam,interior latex house paint, tropical flowers, plastic funerary plants

Intimate ephemera and environmental waste is cast into a slurry of domestic construction materials in the shell of a pregnant Mother Mold torso made in the Mama Spa Botanica in collaboration with reproductive health leaders and BIPOC families.

Yemaya (Bermuda Triangle) is inspired by liberation mythologies of the Caribbean including the Orisha myth of Yemaya and Chango. An allegory of transgressing the brutal impact of slavery on indigenous family structures, the myth denounces colonial nuclear family stigmas while celebrating interdependent communities where Orisha characters emerge from many mothers. It is an allegory for the community of motherhood we have in our tías, abuelas, and mentors. In the myth, Yemanjá, the ocean goddess, lures Chango -- a womanizing macho archetype of masculinity -- into the sea and asks him to repent to his mother for his violence against women. Feeling abandoned by his birth mother, Chango is lured by Yemaya’s beauty and begins drowning after a wave crashes his boat. Yemayá reminds him to forgive and cherish all of his mothers: the one who birthed him, and those who raised him. This story is one of the few myths that normalizes the complex reality of familial structures in slavery while offering a polychromatic and polymorphous future free of shame and internalized violence.