Sacred and Profane didn’t start with collage It started with objects. With improvised altars—devotional, profane. With pieces built from symbols I found during my travels: everyday items, holy cards, religious figurines, plastic flowers, amulets, sacred trash. That’s how this series was born: as an attempt to represent how, in Latin America, beliefs are personalized, blended, and reinvented.
My research began by observing how, in our Latin American culture, religiosity isn’t confined to temples. There are expressions of faith that happen in private, in popular culture, in the streets. The sacred and the profane coexist in home altars, on candle-lit street corners, in rituals without dogma. This series comes from that observation: that our beliefs are shaped by syncretism, adaptation, and tremendous popular creativity.
On one hand, I’m interested in religious syncretism: that fusion that arises from the encounter (and conflict) between colonial Catholicism, African religions, and contemporary spiritual quests. It’s a phenomenon that runs through all of Latin America and re-signifies original symbols.
On the other hand, I’m drawn to popular beliefs, which often fall outside official religious systems, yet are deeply alive in culture. Rituals, festivals, myths, and uncanonized figures that carry profound meaning.
Sacred and Profane is rooted in those observations—devotions that don’t follow fixed rules but carry powerful symbolic force.
We all believe in something. Something intimate, personal, intransferable. Even those who believe in not believing are holding on to something.
Over time, collage emerged as a new language to keep developing this universe. I began working with images the way I had with objects: cutting, taking them out of context, re-signifying. I like to think that, in its original context, an image is sacred. But within a collage, stripped of its “true place,” it becomes profane. And from that, something new is born.
Collage allows me to visually explore the same ideas I had been working on with objects: how contemporary, hybrid, personalized spirituality is constructed. How we build our own faith out of fragments—symbols we take, adapt, and make our own.
