A Diagram of Agency / Butterfly Ally 2024 

( Glances at the Tail of Empathy, in a Void Proximity )

Mixed-media sculpture; natural latex, canvas, ceramics, rope, rust, beetroot, red cabbage, onion peels, henna, clay plaster, straw, found foam, ink.

700 x 80 x 60 cm, hanging from beam.

Graduation Show Sandberg Institute 2024 in Open Door Space.

‘A Diagram of Agency’ explores the relation between proximity and sense of agency, capturing the distance between our eyes and hands, our ears and feet. It attempts to viscerally involve its viewer in an encounter with its material complexity and formal ambiguity. The object emanates from a process of shifting between taking apart and mending together, oxidizing and sealing, cooking and washing. Against against, the object is a token for practices of resilience and cyclical movements, as it tries to find the equilibrium between growth and decay throughout all its layers.



The work was conceptually inspired by recent experimental neuropsychological research which tries to grasp the role of a sense of body ownership in relation to sense of agency; our experience of being able to act willingly to change our inner and outside world. We know that disembodied engagement leads to a lack of agency, which leads to the urgency to assess the effects of the graphic online witnessing of global crises on our perceiving, sensing, and moving bodies. How can one ethically assert oneself in such turbulent times, as a virtual witness?



The world is burning and it turns out that ‘we… instead are progressively regressing to the beginning of the twentieth century, as if Europe desires, in an ultimate melancholic delirium, to relive its colonial past, returning to an era from before the independence movements’ (P.B. Preciado) Inspired by Preciado’s chronicles of crossing, in an ‘Apartment on Uranus’ in which an intersectional perspective is maintained drawing parallels amongst different systems of oppression and subordination, the work tries to maintain a state of crossing. It is aesthetically exploring the space in between stable forms as a strategy to undermine systems that depend on their internal opposition, their binary logic, from outside and within.



In wondering about how, where, and from what material the creating ‘I’ would cultivate an object according to a post-colonial, post-patriarchal, and post-spiciest logic, the reinforcement of slow, reparatory, and sustainable movement took a central place in the process of making, besides minimizing the production of material and toxic waste. Being the result of methods that are typically applied within domestic spaces such as cooking, mending, and sowing, the work investigates how the process of creation can find its rhythm and pacing in gestures of care, nourishment, and introspection, bringing these marginalized, yet essential intentions into the outside world.

Butterfly Ally

Mixed-media sculpture;

paper, inkjet print, ebonized date and apple seeds, a found branch, steel.

180 cm x 50 cm x 50 cm

Butterflies are the most familiar insects to human beings, who have a four-stage life cycle, and like other holometabolous insects, undergo complete metamorphosis. Winged adults lay eggs on the food plant on which their larvae, known as caterpillars, feed. The caterpillars grow, sometimes very rapidly, and when fully developed, pupate in a chrysalis. When metamorphosis is complete, the pupal skin splits, the adult insect climbs out, expands its wings to dry, and flies off. Allies are countries that have officially agreed to help and support each other, especially during a war.

‘Butterfly Ally’ is poetically echoing ‘a Diagram of Agency’; You may take a cocoon with them, to open it when your awareness allows for it.