Artist’s statement from the exhibition at ICASF:

“When I started working on these pieces, I was processing the departure from my homeland, and, subsequently, I was experiencing a lot of tension between my decisions and my cultural identity as a Puerto Rican. I drew a lot of support from my sister and wished to find a connecting point within our parallel displacement. As I failed to do so, I was drawn to follow her experiences remotely, which took me to a live broadcast being streamed from a NOAA vessel. My sister was part of the crew on the expedition, which aimed to map undiscovered parts of the ocean floor. I took segments of the broadcast throughout a day and sequenced them while imposing a set of vocalizations. These were proposed as tools for searching and connecting in the same way a sonar would work, as they mimicked the movements of the vessel and water. Following the tension I felt once again due to my sister’s participation in the U.S. agency’s expedition and her physical presence on the vessel, I wanted both pieces to come face-to-face. As my sister herself performed the action of covering herself completely with blue fabric while standing on our homeland and soil, I opened the path to a conversation about the context of the sea in the Caribbean and the use of its waters to colonize our past and present.

Both pieces draw references from the poem "La ciudad navío" by Rosario Ferré. In it, she proposes a mythical image of the Puerto Rican land and establishes the coastal waters and their vessels as seductive and treacherous. She also provides a perspective on those inhabitants of the land who migrate and then become seafaring beings, which I propose is happening to me now”.