Pilar Castillo

Seat

2020

The recurring images in my dreams are of landscapes, in particular the tropical farmland of my childhood home, and oceanside tsunamis as I ran to higher ground. In this pandemic dream I experienced the passage of time and layering of history. I encountered the campus of the US university I attended, superimposed over my ancestral homeland in Belize. The dream revealed my struggle with the duality of higher education versus ancestral knowledge, as well as a feeling of being suffocated by academia and Eurocentric ideals.

This collage draws from the colonial map of the “seat of colonization,” the very point of contact as the European invasion claimed our ancestral land as if we did not exist. I used silver and gold to parcel out the lands from the Caribbean and the Americas as a statement on the pursuit of “manifest destiny” that led to stolen land, stolen bodies and, today, stolen minds. My body of work aims to trace my own story in my own voice, and, on a subconscious level, to reclaim the genetic memory that bonds me with my ancestors.