La Casa de Ofrendas (2025 -2026)
Keywords: Ritual and Devotion, Cultural Memory, Migration & Identity
Close-up of the installation (2025) “Ofrenda de Orula” – Ceramic sculpture featuring glazed ceramic fruits in green and yellow, including coconut, avocado, pumpkin, lime, and grapefruit.
Ofrenda para los Orishas is a monumental installation consisting of seven beaded sculptures, vertically suspended between two and ten meters, each dedicated to an Orisha from the syncretic cosmologies of Santería and related South American traditions. The sculptures are not literal portraits, but symbolic vessels of human devotion. The glazed ceramic fruits act as offerings, sustaining the spiritual economy of exchange. The chromatic diversity reflects the specific color systems that devotees use to identify and invoke their Orishas, giving the work a layered cultural significance.
The ceramic beads, rhythmically strung, function both as ornamentation and as an archive, preserving gestures of reverence while critically examining the transactional nature of ritual practice. The installation reinterprets handcrafted materials—beads and blown glass plates—as carriers of cultural memory, resisting their reduction to disposable objects. By referencing Santería’s circular rituals of reuse, Dos Santos creates a model in which objects carry meanings beyond their physical form, encompassing migration, dissemination, and transformation.
The work highlights the interplay between devotion and exchange, illustrating how cultural systems can inspire alternative economies that counteract disposability. The beaded strands act as vertical altars, suspended between earth and sky, while the blown glass plates function simultaneously as ritual vessels and reflective mirrors, engaging the viewer actively in the exchange.
Ultimately, Ofrenda para los Orishas investigates purification—not as mere cleansing, but as transformation. It raises questions about what endures, what is relinquished, and how culture sustains itself through the continuous ritual of giving, receiving, and remembering. Within this constellation of devotion, color, and material, the installation provides space for the contradictions and historical traces embedded in spiritual systems—complexities that do not vanish, but migrate and transform.
The project comprises seven hanging objects, entirely made from ceramic beads. These sculptural forms can be suspended from the ceiling or mounted on the wall, allowing flexible presentation within the exhibition space. Their positioning and arrangement can be adapted to the spatial dynamics and curatorial intent, inviting viewers to experience the installation from multiple perspectives. The delicate construction and tactile surfaces of each object emphasize materiality and rhythm, while their suspended nature evokes a sense of lightness and movement. This flexibility in display creates an immersive experience, where the objects engage in dialogue with the architecture of the space, transforming it into a dynamic environment of form and texture.
My motivation for this project is deeply personal. This experience prompts reflection on how traditions and ritual systems function as carriers of love, resilience, and continuity. I explore the devotional practices I inherited from her, and how these structures remain meaningful within the complex interplay of migration, cultural identity, and independent life. The project becomes an investigation into the tension between personal experience and collective tradition, examining how rituals are transmitted and reshaped across generations.
The result is a monumental installation of seven hanging bead sculptures. Together, they form a collective constellation in space, suspended between earth and sky, symbolizing the connection between the physical and the spiritual, between generations, and across cultural worlds. Their spatial arrangement creates a space for contemplation and interaction: viewers are invited to reflect on how personal memories and shared rituals influence one another, forming a symbiosis of tradition and love. Each object bears the marks of craftsmanship, material choice, and ritual significance, engaging the audience visually and symbolically. The bead sculptures function as carriers of stories and memories, where the personal and collective merge. Through the installation’s monumental scale, the relationship between humans, ritual, and matter becomes tangible. The floating nature of the sculptures evokes movement and transformation, while the composition choreographs attention and contemplation. In this way, a reflective environment emerges where tradition, love, and memory converge into a cohesive field of meaning and experience.
“Ofrenda de Orula” – Ceramic sculpture composed of 45 individual pieces, spanning a total length of 7–10 meters (2025).