Waking Dream, video installation view, NWSA Art Gallery, Miami, Florida, projection mapping, one channel 3 min looped video with audio on a mattress, 190cm x 97cm, 75” x 38,” March 2nd, 2019 - April 30th, 2019. Photo © Alian Rives' Studio

Waking Dream consists of a one-channel video projection with audio projected on a mattress. This video projection is a self-portrait tribute to Jose Marti, a Cuban national apostle, hero, and an important figure in Latin American Literature considered an influential revolutionary philosopher and political theorist. Waking Dream dialogues about identity and self-introspection. The mattress used on the project suggests the geographic condition of the Caribbean “island” immersed in the ocean as a metaphor for isolation, death, and life.

Waking Dream

I dream with my eyes

open and always, by day

and night, I dream.

And over the foam

of the wide and restless sea,

and through the spiraling

sands of the desert,

upon a mighty lion,

the monarch of my breast,

blithely astride

its docile neck,

always I see, floating,

a boy, who calls to me! 

— From Ismaëlillo, 1882