My Cognitive Map

This multimedia sculpture, inspired by the braiding techniques of Maroon women from el Palenque de Benkos y Wiwa, in the Colombian Caribbean translates a personal narrative into a visual landscape of braids and videos.

She questions how retrieving ancestral knowledge can help her navigate spaces and envision alternative futures.

Physical spaces are encoded into a language through hairstyles. Each of them becomes a location, a safe space, away from her main home.

Maroons considered the territory through corporality, achieving emancipation in this manner. Bodily practices of braiding represent a political action that, based on ways of appropriating the physical/artificial environment, attain freedoms and empower communities.

She is passionate about researching the liberatory spatial practices of the maroon woman figure of Abya Ayala, especially in the context of a pre-colonial past that determines a decolonial future. She sees the maroon women's mapping technique as a tool not only for decolonizing the mind, body, and territory but also for building a more inclusive future where affects are considered. She aims to weave a bridge between the past and the present, crafting contemporary narratives. This pursuit has drawn her towards designs that live in the space, or create a space where the public can explore how to harness diasporic ancestral knowledge that places care at the centre. She likes to challenge dominant narratives by reinterpreting historical events through a non-Eurocentric lens creating new ones.