Memoriam

2026

The coral necklace is a protective amulet that threads collective efforts for environmental conservation and awareness. This site specific offering was originally installed in El Yunque national forest in 2024 with a different arrangement. On this occasion the energy that grew on this amulet in the rainforest migrated to the Centro Cultural Julia de Burgos in Harlem, New York. The rope, made with natural fibers, interlaces members of varying communities that participated in the cabuya craft making, inherent from our ancestors.

This necklace composed of beads of bleached coral also signals the evidence of loss of life as a memoriam for its awareness. It also serves as a votive offering for the ecosystem’s health and our intention for ocean sustainability. Underneath the necklace there’s a dry painting using leftover coral dust that depicts a dinoflagellate as an ode to this microscopic organisms that symbiotically supports the coral reef. This monophyletic single-celled eukaryotes, usually considered protist, are the smallest member of our water ecosystem’s food chain, but also the greatest equalizer that supports the balance of life in this planet, not only providing us with oxygen, but also nourishing the abundance of food we get from the ocean. If we loose them by polluting our waters, everything collapses in our ocean from the beginning of the food chain. At the same time, if we contaminate with an excess of fertilizers in the water due to terrestrial runoffs, their population then blooms too quickly intoxicating our environment and depleting life in the end of our ocean food system where we humans strive. Memoriam is an awareness alert, but also vows directly to nature in a ceremony of votive offerings. At the end of the exhibition this coral necklace travels back to the Island to be finally installed in the ocean bed as an underwater installation. The idea is to regrow new coral using the dead ones that were once washed up on shore due to extreme storm surges in Puerto Rico.