Headlands Center for the Arts

Artist Statement

I create temporal environments across sound, film, and installation, engaging with time as speculative history—one that moves fluidly between memory and possibility. My practice is rooted in compositional frameworks derived from dreams. These dream scores intertwine oral histories and ancestral memory to navigate spaces between remembering and forgetting, belonging and displacement.

As a multi-instrumentalist and composer of Yaqui ancestry, my work is shaped by survival and resistance as a continuum, connecting past, present, and future generations. Through embodied performances and installations, I aim to transform contested spaces into environments where visitors experience themselves as part of larger patterns of memory and possibility, seeking wholeness in zones of fracture and forging new paths toward liberation.

While At Headlands

While at Headlands, I will develop a site-responsive dream score and multi-channel sound installation exploring the convergence of military architecture, layered colonial history, and land memory. My process involves field recording environmental sounds, then processing them through bunker acoustics where alternative timelines emerge—from Coast Miwok stewardship through military occupation to speculative futures.

Sustained time on-site allows me to develop the work iteratively—mapping bunker acoustics, field recordings, spatializing sound, and discovering how the environment interacts and responds over time. I’m drawn to what is revealed when these elements transform together: what the bunkers want to sound like now, how human and non-human sounds change through them.

I perform within these environments, improvising with horns, percussion, and voice alongside processed landscape sounds and projections. The installation shifts from passive observation to embodied participation, where the space itself becomes a portal between ancestral memory and speculative futures.

Selected Works

Ancestros Futuros, from Vol.3 Ancestros Futuros, 2025. Audio Recording.

Pyramid of the Sun, live performance, National Sawdust, 2024. Video captured by Bradley Wagner. Video editing and audio mixing by Cochemea Gastelum.