Virtue (2026)

Description

Virtue is an interactive, mixed-media installation that asks what the Marianas have been made to give, what has been taken from it, and what forms of injury remain suspended in its land, forests, spirits, and histories. Moving between Chamorro cosmology, Catholic angelology, colonial archives, military extraction, invasive ecologies, and healing practice, the sculpture treats research as a material act: archival fragments, ethnographic apprenticeship, biological knowledge, and sculptural form become part of the same inquiry. By transforming scholarly questions into a physical encounter, Virtue asks viewers to enter, inspect, and ethically confront whether healing remains possible under conditions of spiritual, environmental, and historical collapse.

Concept

Virtue begins with an angelic name and carries it into the wounded terrain of the Marianas. In Catholic angelology, the Virtues are ranked spirits of motion, miracle, and elemental governance. They are said to assist with storms, strengthen faith, and help order the forces of nature. I place this figure beside Chamorro histories of land, medicine, conversion, militarization, and ecological harm to ask what “virtue” can mean in a place repeatedly asked to give itself over: to empire, to science, to salvation, to war, to research, to care.

The sculpture investigates the Marianas as a place made useful across many regimes of value. Colonial archives have treated the islands as a scene of encounter and conversion; military histories have treated them as strategic terrain; biological and environmental research has treated them as an experimental field; heritage discourse has often condensed Chamorro life into recognizable icons. Virtue gathers these concerns into a single mixed-media installation. Its exterior, shrouded in black mesh, draws from the aerial roots of the banyan tree and stages the forest as a spiritual threshold. Its interior holds a damaged world: a singular latte stone, broken lumot, a stranded proa, invasive species, poisonous plants, military traces, and a decapitated Chamorro figure asking for forgiveness and breath.

The project remains in dialogue with Marcel Mauss’s The Gift, especially his account of obligation, return, and the spirit of exchange. If land, knowledge, labor, and spiritual care have been drawn from the Marianas, the sculpture asks what kind of return has been demanded, delayed, or refused. Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae offers the theological vocabulary of the Virtues, while Antonio Pigafetta’s historic chronicle of Magellan’s travels opens a colonial archive of appetite, violence, and first contact. Alongside these texts, the work draws from Chamorro healing practice, biological research on invasive species, military history, and apprenticeship-based knowledge of plants and medicine.

What remains are ethical questions about how artwork invites encounters while protecting what should remain guarded. How can those who wish to heal inspect a wounded world without repeating the habits of extraction that produced that wound? What forms of return could the Marianas ask from those who have imagined it?

further documentation are located in the slideshows, “Interrogating Virtue” and “Virtue Pamphlet”.