Location: Port Limón, Costa Rica
This site sits at the crossroads of personal and collective history. The railroads in Limón mark the entry point where my ancestors, along with thousands of other Jamaican laborers, arrived in the late 19th century. They came to Costa Rica under harsh conditions, contracted to build the railway that would connect the Caribbean coast to the Central Valley. Alongside this labor, they sustained the emerging banana industry, a crop that became central to Costa Rica’s economy and identity.

For my family, and for many Afro-Caribbean families in Costa Rica, this site represents more than infrastructure—it is a place of arrival, of survival, of forced adaptation. It is both the beginning of a new lineage and the site of profound dislocation. The railroads hold the residue of that migration: the weight of bodies, the sound of steel against steel, the lingering scent of bananas once hauled along those tracks.

To stand, perform, and create at this location is to honor those histories while confronting the silences that remain. It is to reclaim space that once restricted Black presence and to make visible the generational sediment of labor, migration, and cultural exchange that shaped Limón—and that continues to shape me.

(2025) In this site-specific intervention, the artist stands before a turquoise structure, gently cradling a soft burlap sculpture placed atop a train switch outside La Casa del Domino. The act of holding introduces tenderness into a site historically tied to colonial infrastructure and forced migration. The work interrupts the narrative of predetermined routes and control, asking what it means to return, to resist inevitability, and to redirect inherited paths. By placing softness and memory against the hardness of industrial machinery, the performance reclaims body, gesture, and care as tools for revision.

At the threshold of the installation, viewers encounter an opening framed by tall burlap tapestries that hang like walls. The fabric is rough, frayed, and patched, carrying the traces of its former life as coffee sacks. Arranged in a maze-like formation, the tapestries create a guided path that narrows and widens as you move through, controlling the pace of entry. The effect is both architectural and bodily: you are not simply walking into an artwork, but being ushered through layers of history, memory, and texture.

(2025) Inside the installation, the space unfolds like a constructed landscape that the viewer must navigate. Two suspended sculptures hang overhead, their wooden pallets and burlap forms casting shadows that shift as you move beneath them. Nearby, two video projections flicker—partially visible, partially obscured—inviting the viewer to shift perspective in order to see more fully. Anchoring the far left corner is a towering stack of wooden pallets, roughly seven feet tall, rising like a monument of labor and memory. The raw textures of burlap, wood, and rope create an environment that feels at once fragile and weighty, guiding the body through pathways of obstruction and passage. Traversing the installation becomes an embodied journey, where each turn, pause, and encounter with materials activates layers of history and survival.

(2025) The towering structure, built from salvaged wooden pallets, rises like a monument of survival and remembrance. Rope secures family photographs to its surface, while personal items—currency, incense, a spoon, a comb, and other mementos—are tucked into the nooks and splinters of the wood. From inside the structure, a soundscape emerges, created from the rhythmic clanging and resonance of railroad spikes and chains. This audio element transforms the sculpture into a living presence: a container not only of objects but also of sound, evoking the histories of labor and migration that underpin diasporic survival. The raw wood contrasts with the fragility of the photographs, while the sounds remind viewers of the physical and emotional weight carried across generations. Together, the materials, images, and sound make the piece both archive and altar, grounding the installation in memory, survival, and testimony.

(2025) The installation features a mound of burlap bundles bound tightly with rope, piled to resemble both cargo and burden. Suspended above, a wooden pallet holds more burlap forms and a buoy tethered with rope, appearing caught between drifting away and being anchored in place. The raw textures of burlap, rope, and wood evoke histories of transport, labor, and survival. Together, the forms reference the precarious conditions of migration across water—suggesting how bodies, memories, and materials have been carried, bound, and set adrift through the violence of displacement and the persistence of survival.

(2025) In this installation, a wooden pallet is suspended above a heavy, rusted steel train wheel, anchoring the piece with the material weight of labor, migration, and industry. Behind the pallet, a video monitor plays a performance of the artist moving on ancestral land in Costa Rica. The pallet’s slats obscure the screen, offering only partial views—gestures of the body, shifts of landscape, never the whole picture. This obstruction mirrors the fractured nature of inherited histories: access that is always incomplete, stories that are carried yet obscured, landscapes that belong and remain distant. The work invites reflection on what it means to hold such weight while still seeking ways to see, return, and belong.

(2025) Carry What Carries You is a suspended soft sculpture made from dyed burlap, acrylic, rope, ship netting, and metal. The form hangs bundled beneath a weathered wooden pallet, recalling both protection and burden. The pallet evokes transport and commerce—systems of global exchange and displacement—while the netted bundle below suggests memory, survival, and inheritance carried across generations. The work asks what we hold, and what holds us, transforming utilitarian materials into a meditation on resilience and the unseen labor of survival.

Dissonance of Time is a black-and-white video installation integrated into the base of a sculptural structure. The footage shows the artist carrying and cradling soft burlap sculptures while walking through a field-like landscape. Although filmed in 2024, the aesthetic recalls archival footage from the late 19th century, unsettling the viewer’s sense of chronology. The monitor’s placement forces the viewer to bend or shift perspective to see it fully, heightening the work’s emphasis on partial access and fractured memory. The piece embodies a temporal collapse, where ancestral memory and lived experience coexist in unresolved tension.