This project titled Bahoruco consists of a series of research and pilgrimage journeys made by the artist through spaces of resistance, liberation and Afro-indigenous spirituality in the Antilles. The main axis and starting point is the Sierra de Bahoruco: the site of the first important indigenous and African rebellions against Spanish colonial power in the Americas.
 
Bahoruco is composed of a series of objects and paintings that witness these experiences through elements of botanical, animal and mineral origins that the artist has collected over the course of two years. The intention has been to create devices, artifacts and machines for the transmission of ancestral knowledge of the island as a way of connecting with these forces and energies. The nam present in the stones, leaves, roots and branches of plants, in the earth extracted by a solenodon while feeding on larvae, in the springs of water and ritual spaces, in the resin and fruits of the copey, in the sonorities of the lambí, the tuatua of the gagá and the canoíta of the congos, in fibers of palm leaves, in the ceibas and in a piece of perfumed guaconejo.
 
There are also works inspired by the region's Afro-indigenous architecture and ritual material culture. Specifically, compound objects (such as columns and architectural elements), containers, plates, burners, pedestals and vessels, with rods as integrated transmitting antennas inspired by African and indigenous forms and symbols of the island and the Antilles. Thus, these elements collected in these tours and rituals, activate energy and ancestral forces of living beings - physical and spiritual - of native and fleeting individuals, from luases and orishas. Loaded machines with ancestral technologies and energies are present to continue to resist the last onslaughts of colonial power in the present moment. Tools to imagine new societies, or even: new non-colonial futures.
 
The ecological balance of the sierra of Bahoruco is being deeply affected by the production and exports for the countries of the global north, such as avocado monocultures in the foothills of its mountains which reduce the forest areas and consume its water sources, as well as by the indiscriminate logging of guaconejo, a bush used for the production of perfumes.
 
However, the sierra will continue to resist along with the solenodonte, a prehistoric mammal that coexisted with dinosaurs and survived the great asteroid that has had burrows for millions of years, and together with the knowledge of these new African and indigenous social structures formed in the mountains - around the conucos, bateyes and manieles - which constitute the true origin of the Caribbean and Antillean cultures.
 
We have never been Creoles or Europeans - we have been Maroons and Indians, dispossessed of their lands, and they tried to strip us of our culture and beliefs. Today, we continue to rediscover our true being and our pure essence. Along with our ancestry, we are not 530 years old, we are millenarians. We are women and men of the forest - women and men of the future.
 
If the white European was once able to impose himself as the only experience and desirable, replicable and imitable strategy, today, through understanding our black and indigenous experience, we can propose alternatives for the use of new technologies and strategies for coexistence, survival, wellbeing as well as new ways of connecting with other beings and the planet. In other words, new forms of political, social and ecological organization.