Castellano created over three hundred ceramic vessels during her residency, each one referencing a specific form from pre-Columbian pottery traditions. Once fired, she deliberately shattered each piece and then undertook the painstaking process of reassembling them — not into their original forms, but into new hybrid objects that combined fragments from different traditions and time periods.
The resulting objects are both beautiful and unsettling: familiar enough to evoke specific cultural memories, yet strange enough to resist easy categorization. Displayed on low platforms that invited close inspection, they prompted visitors to consider what is preserved and what is lost when cultures are fragmented and recombined.
The installation was accompanied by a series of drawings documenting each vessel before and after its transformation, creating a visual archive of the creative-destructive process at the heart of the work.
Critical response highlighted the project's ability to address weighty themes — colonialism, cultural erasure, the ethics of archaeological practice — through the intimate, tactile language of craft.
