A'JaeCea Carlie x Luisa Pinzón

(Photo & Media MFA 25, Music MFA 23)
ajcarlie.com

I Made a Promise, 2025

AJaeCea Carlie’s I Made a Promise, made in collaboration with Luisa Pinzon, is an immersive interactive installation comprising a sculpture, photographs, a sound installation, projections, and a materials library. The transdisciplinary installation is grounded in lived embodied experience, research, and queer, trans crip ontologies. The work draws parallels between the health and fragility of coral reef ecosystems and humans, born from a personal reckoning with chronic illness and environmental collapse. The overall experience centers ecological interdependence, multispecies care, and alternative forms of knowledge and communication. Carlie lived near the illegal Chiquita landfill operations that contributed to chronic full body pain, which left them bedbound and unable to walk. But in the ocean, they could float. Over time, they developed a deeply personal connection to Cnidaria phylum (coral and sea anemones). They began to chronicle the overlaps between the decline of their own health and that of coral, recognizing the overlaps between coral and human illnesses stemming from pollution and trash.

The 15-foot sculpture’s shape comes directly from a small coral fragment Carlie found tangled in trash on a beach, its shell made from plant-based bioplastics and pigments. Its internal framework uses tensegrity — a structural principle found in both coral and the human body where imbalance in one area destabilizes the whole (mirroring both the strength and fragility of coral — and humans). The sculpture is built from scrap metal, commercial waste, seaweed bioplastic, and calcium carbonate-based ecoexoskeletons. Each material architects a segmental tensegrity of form. Medical gauze — some sourced from Carlie’s surgeries — cover the sculpture. In the materials library, the viewer can see biomaterial experiments that helped inform the work. Inside, Luisa Pinzon’s Coral Symphony — composed from hydrophone recordings of underwater sounds made by coral and marine species that rely on coral for survival — responds to viewers’ presence, creating a symbiotic dialogue between sound and image that mirrors the mutualism of coral reef ecosystems. (Hovering above the sculpture are Carlie’s photomicrographs, the starting points Pinzon launched from to generate touch reactive sound and visuals.) Marine biologists’ recordings of living reefs and marine animals further respond to interactive water sensors that shift sound and images according to the quality of water viewers interact with, gesturing at the ways human actions shape coral health and how coral health shapes our survival. Through a choreography of sensors, datasets and speakers built from scratch, Pinzon creates a 360-degree sound environment within the sculpture.

As a living sculpture that changes organically over time, I Made a Promise speaks eloquently and comprehensively to cycles of extraction, disposal, and regeneration. Provoking consideration, it also creates a space for gathering, resulting in increased care for one another, other species, the ocean, and the environment.

PROXY CHIMERA ORACLE

CalArts 2025