In Aymara, jach’a chuyma — “great heart” — names a largeness of spirit that cannot be measured in cubic space or state borders. Like all forms without measure, it resists governance unless it is first named, divided, and fixed. Institutions and markets rely on this fixing: the map, the census, the curriculum, the price tag — each gives the amorphous an administrable edge.

My practice begins where those edges fray. I work across painting, installation, poetry, and pedagogy to dissolve the bureaucratic outlines that have reduced people, land, and memory to “undifferentiated mass.” In the same way a government stamps a serial number on a bill, I give singularity back to what has been rendered generic — a paving stone, a child’s drawing, a fragment of ceremonial textile. These are not symbols of something else; they are beings with biographies, relationships, and the capacity to hold grief, joy, or refusal. And here comes the paradox: I insist on this singularity so that community can exist, so there is a common cosmos in which we are together.

The art, the questions, the gatherings — all of it is to refine the art of communal living. We have not yet mastered this as human beings. The West is deeply individualistic; traditional cultures have created structures of collective life, but also with different levels of internal violence, especially toward those outside the figure of the straight man. Colonization imposed a patriarchal frame that erased other possible worlds, but even before, disparity existed. What we must learn — and I am curious to study and refine — is how those disparities transformed into violence or not, at what levels, and with what implications. I have no doubt that communal living is the path forward, but it must be sharpened, deepened, and made more just.

I approach matter as intelligent and self-organizing — a co-creator, never a passive medium. In Aymara ways of knowing, stones, rivers, and ancestral bones are participants in life. But I resist turning this into a romantic token; Aymara sensibility is also about social mobility, about growth, about suma qamaña — good living. We are not satisfied to be imagined only as highland farmers contemplating the mountains while the nearest doctor is hours away, or climbing a hill for internet, or sending our children to schools without resources. We want all the fullness of modern possibility, without exploiting others or ourselves.

Beauty, for me, is not and should never be a privilege. I came from financial scarcity but never from nothing — I came from everything:

A mother that was working sometimes 24 hours shifts as a nurse, a dad that despite his alcoholism and extra sensitive soul was a genious teacher who taught me how to read and write before school did, who showed me how to create images with a pencil and then ideas with images, images into questions, questions into art, art into life, the good life,  who would always told me to read, whatever, but read. Who told me I was bright and gifted, everyday of my life, a mother whose way through life is to make things easy because life is already not. A grandpa whose most common ask from the upper forces were: wisdom and patience, whose spiritual core was my refuge and north, who would read to me, burn eucalyptus leaves with me and call me churucutita, who would hug me when I cried and when I didn’t, who would listen to me, fully, who received me, no questions asked, who would protect me and sit with me for endless nights, a dad who rose before the sun to give me care and pito de cañahua tea, who never agreed with my ways but still told me I was exceptional, always, an illiterate grandma who ended her days also illiterate, who would yell the life out of her lungs and still give me the richest soup in the world and tell me never to be financially dependent, specially on a man, and to study as much as I could, and aunties and uncles who taught me things, who gave me food, who mocked me, who admire me and who were there. And a brother who is the incarnation of Love, someone who came from the same everything as me, from the same pain, abundance, goodness, shadows and relentless Love as me, and is wiser and more giving that I could ever be.