THE DESCENT (I love you to the end of the universe and back)
2025 · Generative sound installation · Field recordings, generative audio software, stereo headphones, media player · Dimensions variable. Exhibited in I Grieve Different, Detox Gallery, Chelsea, NY, December 11, 2025 – January 10, 2026.
THE DESCENT is a generative sound installation composed from more than nine hours of audio recorded in the six months between my Abuela’s death and her burial in 2024. The work uses custom code to generate a new arrangement every 175 seconds across nine segments: an intro, an outro, and seven inner gates that reflect the emotional states I moved through during this time.
The recordings begin in Los Angeles while I was packing up my Abuela’s apartment, continue through a summer marked by heartbreak and anticipatory grief, and end in Flagstaff and Williams, Arizona, during the days surrounding her burial. They include birds, thunderstorms, conversations, street noise, music, singing bowls, family stories, and the burial itself.
Inspired by the Sumerian myth The Descent of Inanna, THE DESCENT mirrors Inanna’s journey of surrender and emergence as she passes through seven gates in the underworld to attend a funeral. Every decision is crafted through code that I wrote myself. The loop runs at 175-second intervals, twice my Abuela’s age in seconds at the time of her passing, and echoes the phrase she always said to me: “I love you to the end of the universe and back.”