REFLEJOS is a critical reflection on the humanitarian crisis confronting immigrant children in the United States.
Through layered symbolism and immersive staging, the work holds a reverent yet disquieting space where care and violence coexist.
A participatory space for collective reverence and remembrance open to offer prayers and words of hope written on rose petals.
In a dimly lit room, an altar of roses gestures toward grieving, ritual, displaced lives, and the fragility of childhood.
Shattered mirrors scatter fractured light and multiply reflections—visual echoes of broken narratives, displacement, splintered identities, and the ways systems fracture perception and truth.
A chain-link fence sculpture, its links threaded with a woven LED light, literalizes the boundary that separates and the small, persistent glimmers of innocence, hope, visibility, and memory that remain within confinement.
Looping audio of a heartbeat anchors the room, pacing the viewer’s experience with the intimate, human rhythm of the children at the center of this trauma.
On-screen, an immigration-lawyer newscast describes the harrowing conditions inside ICE detention centers, supplying factual testimony that grounds the work in contemporary urgency.
REFLEJOS asks viewers to witness—to look closely at the poetic and physical remnants of policy and neglect, and to reckon with those who suffer and those who profit from these systems.
The altar and flowers compel empathy and remembrance; the broken mirrors force us to confront multiple, often conflicting reflections of responsibility; the fence and LED light make tangible the tension between containment and resilience; and the heartbeat and testimony insist on the lived, embodied stakes behind headlines.
This installation neither prescribes solutions nor softens culpability. Instead, it functions as a space for ethical confrontation: to hold grief, to register complicity, to name those who suffer and those who profit, and to imagine the dignity owed to every child.
Presented at
@artfieldssc 2026
