Mothertongues, 2023
The Palikur of the Rio Urucauá offer us an arresting account of world making not just in space-time but in space-time- consicious-ness, stories of the sky and underworld encompass a knowledge of the movement of the stars as a path making around this world via trajectories that navigate the underworld. Theirs is a holographic universe. Using the sinuous forms of the river and the anaconda as a fundamental geometric object enables an understanding of space-time that is ‘curvilinear’ rather than euclidian and of the void as a generative force.
The unknown has ever sung a siren song to our species, possessing qualities of both poison and panacea, in popular culture the void is at once a threat and a challenge, a reckoning with uncertainty and an invitation to discovery. How we construct the unknown, the language we use to describe it a barometer of our biases. In her book, ‘The Disordered Cosmos’, Black feminist cosmologist explores ‘the hot mess’ of language that undergrids Quantum Chromodynamics, remarking on terms like ‘coloured physics’ to reflect on how a mostly homogenous white community writes its own social politics into formal scientific language. Indeed dark matter, (and dark energy) that was first described by Henri Poincare as Matiere Obscure does not refer to colour but rather to the unseeable, the invisible. If dark matter is a poetic reminder of how much we don’t yet know about the universe, it is curious that it employs the self same language that describes the fear of the unknowable at the scale of skin, at the scale of the other.
First to unearth the language and imaginaries of the void and the unknown at the subatomic and the cosmic scales from the scientific knowledge production at the Black Hole Initative, Harvard University and among the cosmologies of the communities I have the honour to learn from as a practising conservationist, artist and designer. What alternative conceptualisations of the void are possible? How do indigenous ontologies describe the void/the unknown? What are practices, rituals, and instruments that they employ to engage with the unknown? can an artistic methodology engage the cosmopolitics of the void/unknown and critique the intellectual heritage that gives allow institutions to manifest in different terms and different imaginaries? How does language generate the geographies of political cosmology? How might we thicken conceptions of the void and the unknown as a site flush with virtuality, a non dualistic arena haunted by the unsettled play between presence and non presence, existence and non existence, as a not nothing but a desiring orientation composed of its own ontology? And perhaps most interestingly, can ontologies of the void in indigenous cosmologies provide a meaningful paradigmatic prompt to scientific ontologies of dark matter and dark energy? What would a cross pollinatory dialogue between these two non hierarchal orientations look like?
Dark Matter
Technical Artifact | 2025
Dark Matter is a 1:1 replica of the Rosetta Stone coated in Vantablack, a nanomaterial composed of vertically aligned carbon nanotubes that absorb 99.965% of visible light. Unlike traditional paint, Vantablack functions by trapping photons in a microscopic forest of carbon, eliminating all surface contours and rendering the object optically void. By merging the symbolic weight of the Rosetta Stone with the physics of unseeability, Dark Matter confronts the historical entanglement of empire, language, and light. as a cut in visibility, a site where the epistemic architectures of knowing and not-knowing are co-constituted. The black surface is more than void, it is a constitutive opacity, a refusal that generates new regimes of attention. Will be on display at MIT LIST Visual Art Center in March 2026.
El Gobernante de la Galaxia
Technical Artifact | 2024
El Gobernante de la Galaxia is a message from Carlos Vega, a Yatiri of the Atacama Desert. It traces his journeying through space and his communion with darkness. It is a transgalactic dispatch and a message to humanity from the high desert sky.