Noel Caban 

Havens? No!  To carry a Latino identity in this age of precarity is to feel the weight of existence pressed on the mind and soul. I witness families torn apart, homes reduced to empty shells, as a guise of patriotism devours entire communities. Each loss reminds me of the fragility of belonging, of how easily the ground beneath us can be declared foreign. And yet, I carry within me fragments that refuse to vanish, voices, lessons, and memories that insist on continuity even in the face of erasure. To be human is to live inside this tension: to endure the wound while still making space for compassion, to refuse forgetting even as I am asked to disappear. It is from this understanding that this work series titled: Havens? No! emerges: a collection of works and constructions that wrestle with the contradictions of shelter, faith, and survival.  Composed from fragments of discarded wood, insulation, stretcher bars, and printed remnants, these works inhabit a space between ruin and proposition, fragility and endurance.