The Novels of Elsgüer is a series of 5 transdisciplinary installations developed in collaboration with Santiago Tavera since 2017. These works combine nonlinear storytelling, textiles, video, digital images, lights, interactive elements, sculpture, and experimental soundscapes to create mixed reality compositions, immersive environments and expanded performances. These surreal scenographies explore notions of representation, belonging, displacement and otherness, blurring the line between physical and virtual spaces. Each installation within the Elsgüer series is referred to as an "episode".

Episode 1: When the River Sings Stones it Brings

This installation is composed of video projection mapping onto a large inflatable textile sculpture, along with a set-up of multiple screen monitors, led lights, beading, rocks and spatialized sound. This virtual landscape explores skin as a territory comprised of layers of lived experiences and accumulated memories, which continuously shape and transform its topography. This work specifically reflects on how the skin of Bipoc individuals (similar to the natural landscape) carries the history of processes of colonialism: lineages of both oppression and resilience. This living membrane is then a terrain in itself, which transforms and adapts over time like a geographical ground. 

  • Maison de la Culture Claude-Léveillée Montreal, Canada September 16 - November 8, 2021

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  • Project Casa - POP Montreal Montréal, Canada ​ September 15 - October 2, 2022

Episode 2: The Embrace of the Saw

This immersive cinematic experience combines multiple video projections, holographic images, surround lighting, sculptural elements and spatialized soundscapes, to assemble a scenography of shifting architectures, where classical structures and elastic amorphous bodies are caught in a process of breaking appart. It explores the concept of rupture: how moments of fracture (within ourselves, our relationships or with the systems and environments we are part of) can become generative paths towards transformation and renewal.

  • OBORO, Montreal, Canada, January 23 - March 21 2026

Episode 3: Live Despecho

This installation combines virtual reality, video projections, lighting, digital animations, performance, textile sculptures, soundscapes and live security cameras to create an environment where repeated elements, including the presence of the viewers themselves, appear multiple times in both physical and virtual forms. This piece delves into how migrant and queer bodies are multiple and in constant translation across digital and geographical borders. In this ongoing process of displacement, the body inevitably longs to belong, going through more than a heartbreak: a despecho.

  • Articule, Montreal, Canada November 3-December 2, 2018

  • Sur Gallery, Toronto, Canada April 1 - May 29, 2021

  • 17 FESTIVAL INTERNACIONAL DE LA IMAGEN Manizales, Colombia May 7-11, 2018

  • Virtual Reality World

Episode 4: Camouflaged Screams

This interactive installation explores the (a)symbiotic relationship between us and the natural environment. This augmented cinematic experience incorporates large-scale panoramic video projections of a recorded performance with camouflaged textile pieces, along with motion sensors, enveloping soundscapes, lighting setups and sculptural elements. As the audience moves around the installation, their movements have the capacity to alter the images and sounds in the space, asking viewers to reflect on how their presence and actions have a direct effect on the environments that surround them. Camouflage here becomes an allegory not for hiding but rather for choosing how we are positioned in space in order to consciously relate to the environments we are part of.

  • Optica - Centre d'Art Contemporain Montréal, Canada, April 17 - June 12, 2021

Episode 5: If I Saw You I Don’t Remember

This installation is an ecosystem of large video projections, spatialized soundscapes, live camera feeds, light compositions and 3D animations based on data analysis captured from a performance with a light reflective textile. The performer wearing the textile, or the textile hanging as a sculpture, is placed inside a sealed room in the middle of the gallery and is never seen directly, yet their presence takes over the entire space through various digital traces. Through this, the work invites the audience to question how those bodies who are deemed invisible and excluded in society still have immense influence over the environments we all share. This work places the audience in a threshold between body and space, where lack of visibility does not erase presence.

  • MAI - Montréal, arts interculturels Montréal, Canada, February 8 - March 7, 2020

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