 The way I look at cancer is that it was not a negative thing. Even when I was going through it, I was like, oh, what am I supposed to learn here? What is my lesson here? And that's kind of like how I discovered sound therapy. I was always interested in sound, but I didn't know the power of sound and how sound is medicine. Hi, my name is Walupe Maravilla and I'm an artist in Healer and I'm a Minescape artist in residence at the Brooklyn Museum. Before the pandemic hit, I was working with the undocumented community and the cancer community, but after the pandemic, it seems like everyone is struggling with mental health. Creating art that can kind of allow someone to learn a little bit about how to heal themselves is key. I'm a New Yorker. I've been here since I was eight years old, but I feel like I'm a displaced person. I can't go back to Osaldor. I cannot live there. My entire family left in the Civil War. I don't really have anyone there. My connection is to those undocumented people that somehow make their way to New York City. They bring in their stories. With their stories, they bring their own traumas. And this is opportunity for me to share all the knowledge that I've picked up along the way. Currently, I'm working on a lot of sculptures that I call disease throwers. Someone can lay on it and receive kind of a vibrational therapy. All summer, I've been doing sound bats at Sarkozy Sculpture Park. And I've collected a lot of the coal and a lot of the ash from all the fires, from all the ceremonies. And they've been integrated into the mixture of this material that I call the skin of the disease thrower. I also want to have these objects from the Brooklyn Museum Collection, which are these mind figurines of my descendants, but also I want to have maybe some type of collaboration with undocumented teens who are my descendants as well. And I want them to presence to be part of the exhibition. So it's kind of connecting the past and the present and the future all at once. It's exciting for me. I'm learning so much right now. I was part of the first wave of undocumented children on a company to come to the United States in the 80s. Going back to different parts of Mexico and confronting spaces that I traveled through when I was eight years old without my parents escaping into the war is part of the healing process. So I go back to Mexico and Central America and I collect objects from these spaces. Every object has energy. So it's really important for me to find objects that relate to the energy that I want the sculpture to have. Working with Minescapes is exciting because I get to share the work that I'm doing with the world basically. I would love for someone to come into the Brooklyn Museum and see who I am, but also my ancestors and also my descendants. I want them to actually really start thinking about who their ancestors are and who the descendants will be, right? I'm really excited about the possibilities of the work I've been alive after I'm not here anymore. Maybe 100 years they can be activated and still have healing qualities to them.