Artist Statement
My practice positions plants as active collaborators and sentient agents within ecological and ancestral systems. Drawing from my matrilineal Galician heritage—where my grandmother taught me to recognize plants as healers and teachers—I engage with Celtic druid cosmologies, treating plants as living instructors that inform each phase of my process. This echoes Karen Barad's concept of intra-action, where boundaries between human and more-than-human dissolve. My work blurs art, science, and ritual through sculptural interventions, choreographies, textile+AI, and video. I invite encounters that honor ancestral wisdom alongside contemporary ecological urgency. Each project is site-responsive, guided by attentive listening and respectful kinship with the living land. Through embodied practice rooted in my mother's sidewalk choreographies—translating landscape into movement—I cultivate spaces that nurture encounters between human and more-than-human consciousness. At Marble House Project, I propose deepening this commitment: making kin with White Oak and Mugwort as teachers, creating installations and rituals that prototype alternative futures rooted in reciprocity and ecological care.
Description: "A Growing Wave Breaks in the Shore of Time (Tomorrow I was a plant)," 2020–2024. Multi-element performative installation, variable dimensions. Curator Nuria Montclus, Commission for Manifesta 15 Biennial, Barcelona, Spain (2024) — Europe's premier nomadic contemporary art biennial. This expansive site-responsive installation transforms gallery space through a constellation of ceramic, plants, stone, rubble, textile, and performative elements that activate Karen Barad's concept of "intra-action"—the radical entanglement of human, more-than-human, and material agencies. At the installation's core rest three monumentally scaled iridescent ceramic spheres (resembling seeds, eggs, or planetary bodies), nested within sand and reclaimed stone, creating what appears as ancient ceremonial thresholds while simultaneously evoking speculative futures shaped by deep time geological consciousness. The work materializes Bajo's "anarchoreographic" methodology—a non-hierarchical, decentered approach to performance and spatial organization that refuses traditional choreographic hierarchy. Textile banners suspended within the installation (woven using Jacquard looms, proto-digital machines that translate code into cloth) feature AI-processed patterns derived from the artist's altered-consciousness drawings, creating a transmaterial dialogue between ancestral knowledge, algorithmic intelligence, and botanical consciousness. The iridescent ceramic surfaces shift chromatically as viewers navigate the space, echoing both Byzantine-era cosmological symbolism and contemporary quantum aesthetics. During Manifesta 15's four-month presentation (100,000+ visitors), the installation was publicly activated through meditative encounters where visitors engaged in "transcorporeal choreographies"—embodied practices that dissolved boundaries between human movement and plant temporality. The work proposes plants not as passive landscape elements but as "narrators of their own history" and alternative epistemologies for understanding deep time, ecological resilience, and more-than-human collaboration. Materials: Reclaimed rubble from local industrial decay, stones, sand, ceramic vessels (hand-glazed with iridescent finishes), jacquard loom textiles with AI-generated patterns, dried papaver capsules, liquid extract, plant parts, seeds,leaves, flowers, seeds, water elements, plant opium perfume, acrliyc and watercolor plant pigment on canvas, performative installation.
