Miami Beach Urban Studios – Washington Gallery

1618 Washington Avenue, 4th Floor

Miami Beach, FL 33139

Title: Ancestral Apparatus

Opening Tuesday, December 2, 2025 | 6–9pm

Description:

Ancestral Apparatus is a research project presented as an exhibition that maps and reinterprets more than 300 jagüeyes—ancestral water reservoirs that sustain life across the desert territory of La Guajira, shared between Colombia and Venezuela. These earthen infrastructures, carved through centuries of collective knowledge, embody the intersection of ecology, culture, and survival.

For the exhibition, a curated selection of jagüeyes becomes the foundation for a spatial and material translation. Through mapping, modeling, and fabrication, the project reveals these reservoirs as living archives that record cycles of drought and abundance, exposing the intelligence embedded in the desert’s material culture.

Ancestral Apparatus reimagines the jagüey as both research tool and territorial device—an architecture of memory and transformation that links ancestral knowledge with contemporary modes of representation and design.

Authors:

M.DesR. Daniela Atencio & Dr. Claudio Rossi 

Visiting Faculty at FIU in Miami

Associate Professors at Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá