In 2021, I was selected for the second edition of the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Quito's Programa de Residencias y Talleres artisticos , a six-month residency that provided me with a studio within the museum. The residency culminated in a group exhibition with the other selected residents. This residency provided me with uninterrupted time and space to develop Alea, my body of work exploring the dandelion and the wind.

 

Over those months, my studio became two spaces rather than one. Inside the museum, I sketched, planned and ran small experiments on the studio window, researching wind patterns and behaviour specific to Quito alongside the dandelion itself. This indoor research formed the basis of Alea: Atmospheric Dust, one of the works that emerged from the residency.

 

But my studio also extended outdoors. For Alea: Garden, I led a team in transforming a disused area of land behind the museum, measuring roughly 20 by 12 metres, into a dandelion garden arranged in the shape of the wind. This transformation included an old greenhouse on the museum grounds that had been left unused since the start of the pandemic. I repurposed this as a growing space for the dandelions, as well as a venue for workshops. I opened it up to a team of gardening enthusiasts who joined the project and helped to tend the garden.

 

The project was as much a physical process as a conceptual one: over several months, I learnt soil treatment techniques from scratch in order to provide the transplanted dandelion shoots with the conditions necessary for them to take root. What began as a project about a single plant evolved into an ecosystem study of sorts, examining how the dandelions interacted with the surrounding fauna and flora and responded to Quito's climate.

​

The garden transformed the atmosphere of the museum and its neighbourhood in ways that I hadn't fully anticipated. The dandelions attracted butterflies, bees and ladybirds, as well as plants that hosted caterpillars. This allowed us to witness a complete butterfly metamorphosis on-site over time. The museum staff were invited to plant their own dandelions in the garden, becoming collaborators in caring for and learning about this new living entity

 

The growing dandelions went on to collaborate with me again for Alea: Atmospheric Dust, an installation that visualised the shape of the wind using thousands of dandelion seeds, many of which were collected directly from the garden. Both works were presented at the collective exhibition of the residency's participants, Devenir en Registro, held at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Quito between March and April 2022.