Chapuzon

Film, Light, Sand, Terracotta Clay

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Beneath the Caribbean Sea, suspended between the shifting sand below and the rippling surface above, we slip into a rare kind of stillness. A brief moment of suspended weightlessness that exists only between words. Above, the shimmering waves soften the politics and chaos of human life, below the folds of sand hold the histories of the lives that came before us.

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Across the Caribbean, Zemi stones echo this relationship between worlds. Originally made by the Taíno people, these sculptures were believed to carry spiritual force and were given as omens of protection. Their three points speak to the three realms: the sky or heavens, the land of the living, and the underworld. Arranged in a triangular constellation, they are set to open a portal, a world between worlds.

Although past historians insisted the Taíno were wiped out, we now know they didn’t disappear; they descended into many modern Caribbean Latinos. Tracing that ancestry and the culture that survived with it gives us a place to imagine a Latino future that grows from ancestral knowledge. 

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Set in the waters off the coast of Venezuela, this marks the beginning of an imagined seascape — a space for Latino-futuristic dreaming, where the submerged past and the speculative future meet somewhere between the ocean floor and the surface.