Reflexions: Staying Human is a project conceived in 2020, a year marked by the COVID-19 pandemic and profound transformations in socioeconomic and geopolitical dynamics. In response to this context, over approximately two years, together with a team of invited artists, we developed formal studies and experiments that, through different artistic expressions, sought to establish relationships between diverse geographic and social realities: New York, United States, and different territories in El Salvador, including La Libertad, Tamanique, and Calle al Volcán.

During this period, technology use intensified significantly, particularly mobile devices and digital platforms, while the development of virtual reality technologies and, subsequently, artificial intelligence accelerated.

El Salvador, the smallest country in Central America, has widespread mobile device use, while a considerable part of its population lives outside its borders, particularly in the United States. Cities such as New York and Los Angeles are home to significant Salvadoran communities. Historically, a lack of immigration documentation has prevented many people from staying in regular contact with their families for extended periods. In this context, mobile devices have become essential tools for sustaining emotional bonds and staying connected to the lives and well-being of those far away.

At the same time, circumstances such as violence and insecurity have made different forms of confinement, restriction, and isolation part of the everyday experience of sectors of the Salvadoran population. The pandemic intensified these conditions and exposed the vulnerability of broad sectors of society.

The project also turns toward our precolonial past, establishing contrasts between contemporary forms of existence and other ways of understanding the relationship between human beings, nature, objects, and available resources. Rather than idealizing the past, I am interested in asking: What forms of knowledge have been displaced, transformed, or forgotten as our societies have become increasingly dependent on technological systems?

From these questions, Staying Human speculates on a future in which our species' accumulated knowledge might be transferred to other planets, whether through artificial intelligence systems or through human beings adapted to other ecosystems. This speculation takes form in a large-scale diorama constructed from obsolete technological artifacts, functioning simultaneously as landscape, ruin, and a scenario for a possible future: a planet whose conditions make human life impossible outside artificially protected spaces enclosed by domes.

The project juxtaposes these contemporary devices with some of humankind's earliest technologies. Stone appears as a reference to the first tools that extended human capabilities and contributed to the process we now understand as technological development. At the same time, we incorporate references to El Salvador’s precolonial Indigenous past through forms and fragments associated with the material traditions of Nahua-speaking cultures.

The installation proposes an experience composed of microworlds that evoke the individual and collective realities constructed during periods of isolation. Within them, technological objects, archaeological references, imagined landscapes, and speculative forms of life converge.

Finally, Staying Human reflects on the need to preserve the natural ecosystems that make our existence possible. In the face of technological acceleration and contemporary fantasies of expansion to other planets, the project returns to an elemental condition: our species developed through a prolonged process of adaptation to this planet. At the same time, today we attempt to transform our environment—and potentially other worlds—to adapt them to us.

The question running through the project is not only how we will survive the future, but what it will mean to remain human within it.