La Ocupación (2026) follows three women—a blind person, a Deaf person, and a sign language interpreter—through sites in Santo Domingo historically linked to United States military occupations, approached as active layers of meaning that continue to structure the city’s contemporary experience. Throughout the journey, they engage in conversations about inhabiting their bodies and navigating life through distinct sensory experiences.

From this perspective, La Ocupación proposes a re-reading of the concept of occupation: not as military control or territorial domination, but as the inhabitation of the body, senses, and lived experience within a space historically organized through hierarchies of legitimacy and exclusion.

The journey culminates in the Caribbean Sea. To enter the water, the women leave behind the interpreter, continuing instead through a sensory exchange with the sea itself.

The work proposes a dialogue that expands the notion of Caribbean community: not as homogeneity, but as a space where opacity—that which holds the many differences of our Caribbean, not the European Caribbean nor the United States one, but our Caribbean, in all its complexities—can exist and be sustained.

Two historically excluded bodies become mutually included within one another’s worlds.

In the multi-channel installation, additional elements emerge—a stitched map functioning as a tactile surface and humpback whales beneath the Caribbean Sea—expanding the notion of occupation toward both human and non-human scales. The sea, too, has been and continues to be shaped by dynamics of occupation.