Artist Bio

dre r. jácome is an Andean transdisciplinary artist, storyteller, and strategist inspired by magical realism and the survival arts of everyday living. Drawing from her studies in history, herbalism, and interactive technology, she weaves across digital and land-based technologies to honor and defend BIPOC knowledge systems held in story, nature, and recovering cosmologies. Her practice is grounded in relational methodologies—archival research, oral history, critical ethnobotany, and long-term partnership with organizations and chosen family—and indebted to years of working alongside solidarity economy, abolition, and popular education movements across Philly, NYC, and Bogotá. Currently, she serves as the communications director at the After Violence Project.

Tell us about yourself.

DJ: My name is dre, and I am many things: a storyteller, communications strategist, and an artist. And here, for the residency, I will be thinking about how to build on this ongoing project, Earthseed, that I have been walking with for close to four years now. It’s an ongoing storytelling installation that encodes oral history interviews into seed-like sculptures; it’s an experimental archive that sits at the intersection of oral history, physical computation, and land-based knowledge.

I come to this work through a riot of cross-references and a desire for different tactics of storytelling and storykeeping. I think of myself as an artist by accident.

In school, I studied History and Latin American Studies, focusing on Black and Indigenous histories of struggle and resistance across the Americas. My twenties had a lot of chapters: co-founding street art collective #tintedjustice, co-directing community organizing at Girls Rock Philly, stewarding communications for worker cooperatives in NYC, teaching herbalism and tending gardens across the city. Across all of it, I kept finding myself in positions of holding collective stories—ghostwriting, designing the pamphlet, thinking through information architecture for multilingual organizing, bridging narratives into calls to action. I took on positions of responsibility pretty early (eldest daughter of immigrants, surprise surprise). My herbalism practice offered important balance: a tool for personal healing and for repairing my relationship with ancestors and ancestral homelands.

My role has shifted over time—from organizing to communications strategy, where I often think through whether and when stories are ready to be shared, and the best distribution strategies and technologies. Most recently, I was the archive producer for the Healing Justice Lineages digital archive, where I worked with editors Cara Page and Erica Woodland and led the process of interviewing abolitionist healing justice practitioners across the country, as well as the collaborative editorial process for the online archive and political education tools. 

Love the Octavia Butler reference.

DJ: ‘Earthseed’ is a nod to Octavia Butler, who is one of my many teachers. Someone I think a lot with.

In Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, Earthseed is a speculative religion created by the character Lauren Oya Olamina, who suffers from hyperempathy, causing her to share pain and pleasure with any living human she comes into contact with. After being displaced when an organized raid by outsiders destroys her town, we follow her on an odyssey set against the backdrop of dystopian societal collapse, as she finds community and, through it, slowly unearths a new religion, Earthseed. It is a religious system that holds Change as its core, that “God is change,” and believers can “shape God” through conscious effort to influence the changes around them. Overall, it offers a cosmology of survivance (survival and resistance).

Butler’s work is a cautionary tale. People have reached for it, especially in this current polycrisis, citing her eerie foreshadowing with phrases like “Make America Great Again.” But when I first read her 10 years ago, I came to the story through a different door, as the child of a displaced immigrant mother from Colombia, a country devastated by decades of violence and the war on drugs. For me, Olamina’s story wasn’t a warning about what might come. The story felt like an account of what had already happened. I think of the case of my mother’s family—how they were forced to leave their village, a small town between the Atlantic coast of Colombia and the Magdalena River. The village was occupied by unclear actors. The local archive had been burned. People went missing. I didn’t live that experience, but I inherited much of the disconnection, absence, and familial divisions it left behind. 

As I came to be an organizer, what I resonated with most was the offering of a cosmology—a shared spiritual compass for navigating an unraveling world. I recognized in Olamina something I had been reaching for: the importance of a belief system, a reconnection to land, a way of holding together what displacement had scattered.

What does land mean to you?

DJ: Herbalism was my way of reconnecting to land and recovering ancestral medicine and tools that modern medicine couldn’t tend to. I was involved in a number of gardens and taught workshops. But as wellness and homesteading become major trends, I kept asking: how do we grapple with repair while the economies that drove our displacement persist? Where does herbalism fit into the material history of land and labor?

That led me to a personal research project called cocarosa, tracing the parallel histories of coca leaves and roses, two extractive cash crops Colombia produces to meet United States demand. Both are entangled with neoliberal policies, benchmarked by the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act in the early 2000s, showing how neoliberalism and the criminalization of the war on drugs intersect. Reading this history, I kept recognizing something familiar. The parallel logics of extraction, fetishization, and criminalization that I navigate as a brown femme. It ricochets.

How do we not only take from the land but move in solidarity with it? How do we repair the economies that drove the displacement of both medicine and people? I was actively working through these questions at the same time I was working in the solidarity economy movement space, collaborating with organizations like the NYC Network of Worker Cooperatives, the New Economy Coalition, and Art.Coop.

Like Olamina and the community in the Parable series, who develop Earthseed through this iterative process, your work has undergone many transformations. Where exactly did this journey start for you?

DJ: Earthseed began as part of my healing journey. I had a lot of susto to work through after a difficult abortion. It was the summer Roe vs Wade got overturned. The tools that helped most were audio recordings, namely voice notes from friends, and ceremonies with loved ones, namely temazcal ceremonies. (Thank you, Quetzi, Xochi, and Tati for sharing with me.) I won’t say more because that’s not medicine to share, but the experience really touched me and allowed for my own rebirth, in a way. It had me reflect on the importance of site-specific storytelling, songs shared in the dark and on the land. 

At the same time, I was inspired by the sculptures of Salvadoran artist Guadalupe Maravilla. It was a compelling example of an art form that wasn’t just an object in a cold gallery; his works came alive through sound rituals and became a healing tool for communities, particularly undocumented communities and those impacted by cancer. As someone who never had a creative practice focused on art for art’s sake, making tools like this really resonated with me.

I was interested in merging these influences: taking the temazcal structure, comforting voices, and housing them together—encoding stories onto a constellation of LED lights inside an intimate enclosure of natural fiber. Together, a healing site of refuge.

In this iteration, I worked with archival audio recordings of chosen ancestors and teachers whose work has shaped my worldview—Gabriel García Márquez, Oswaldo Guayasamín, Nina Simone, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and others. Teachers who spoke to me and made survival make sense. I was interested in taking these big names and distributing them, somewhat anonymously, into stardust, composing a constellation. Each elder’s audio was represented by a star, connected as a touch-powered constellation, inviting visitors to activate their stories in a small, dark, enclosed space.

The build was a prototype—largely for myself—testing how I felt about mixing indigenous and modern technologies. There were a lot of navigating constraints: making it in NYC, indoors rather than on the land. It lasted about two days before I had to break it down.

How did you land on Kinship? 

DJ: In this iteration, I wanted to think through what it would take to house intimate stories from oral history interviews and protocols of access. And revisit how to house them in a different modular form.

The earlier form served its personal purpose. But I felt a need to evolve. Showing work as an artist was something extremely new to me, and I was reckoning with what it meant to bring work into places that weren’t community spaces. I wanted a form that could live beyond my own journey and very specific references. I was also wary of referencing temazcales outside of their context, of something sacred being flattened or misread. And so I returned to a form I had long admired, one familiar to diverse audiences: pinecones.

What drew me was their discretion. Pinecones have been doing the work of protection and discernment for their seeds for millennia—opening and closing according to conditions of temperature and humidity, sharing their seeds only when conditions are right. That mirrored something I was already thinking about: the way intimate knowledge moves selectively. The same story is told differently between close friends than it is between a grandchild and grandmother, or between strangers. We make these decisions all the time, discerning what to share, with whom, and when. The pinecone’s biomechanics became my muse for reimagining protocols of access. Rather than a direct reference to ceremony, we step into an eleven-foot pinecone, and the stories are encoded into seedpod lights suspended from the ceiling—activated by password and touch, revealing themselves only when conditions are met.

For the interviews themselves, I wanted to work with someone I was already in a deep relationship with—where there was enough trust for this sort of experimentation. Ximena Violante is a transmasc cultural organizer and musician rooted in son jarocho, an Afro-indigenous musical tradition from Veracruz, Mexico. We’ve been chosen family for over ten years as collaborators, witnesses to each other’s journeys of learning and unlearning. Just as land has been my teacher, music has been their compass toward reconnecting with ancestral traditions and building community power. Through a methodology of reciprocal oral history interviews, we reflected together on what the land, our bodies, and our friendship have taught us about our own respective paths of reconnection and survivance. 

I’m grateful to Ximena for extending their trust in this experiment. And to the Oral History Summer School, whose methodologies pushed me to rethink, slow down, and honor smaller archives.

These interviews are collaged alongside excerpts of political speeches from Land Day protests in solidarity with Palestine. At a time when I was involved with student organizing, it felt important to make clear that landback is not only an aesthetic or a metaphor — it is material. Much of the initial fabrication took place at NYU, and I wanted a vibe check built into the work. There’s a computer station at the entrance housing a website — and a passcode. To enter, visitors must recite the phrase: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.“

How was the process of building out this newer structure for Earthseed?

DJ: As far as the physical build, it was a steep learning curve with Fusion 360, a cloud-based 3D design and product development tool. I’m forever thankful to the mentorship and technical advising from Vito Ciancia of NYU The LaGuardia Studio and Phil Caridi of NYU-ITP.

For the base structure, I was thinking through physical accessibility and modular systems. The prior structure was hard for folks with physical disabilities (my mom needs a wheelchair), so I wanted there to be an entrance of at least 46 inches in width. That meant the structure would proportionally have to be very large, and so I had to think through how to make it modular.

Both for the constraints of the CNC machine that would eventually make the cuts and for future storage for myself, since I don’t have a studio or a car. The 3d render began with tracing the silhouette of a botanical illustration of a pinecone. And resulted in over 50 pieces that can all fit in a wagon. To evoke the scales of a pinecone, I dressed the base with scales I made from pantyhose draped over clothing hangers, a soft nod to my origin story and the structure.

For the seedpods, the designs began as 3D scans of samara seeds and were later printed in translucent filament to allow light through. I made adaptations to the file so it could house a capacitive sensor as well as an LED. In fusion, I also made a joint that would connect the seed to the bamboo—the main material suspending the seeds in the sculpture, and also a helpful medium through which the cables ran to the microcontroller on the ceiling. 

As for the touch-audio interaction, this was largely facilitated through serial communication between the Arduino and audio files (from the interviews) that were hosted on p5.js, an open-source JavaScript web library.*

Walk us through the user journey for Earthseed: Kinship.

DJ: There’s a terminal at the entrance, a computer on a podium with a website that offers context and instructions for the installation. It also serves as a vibe check. To access the stories, visitors are asked to complete the phrase beginning with “From the river to the sea.” If answered correctly, the seedpods light up, and the website instructs visitors to put on Bluetooth headphones and move through the space, touching the seedpods to hear the stories encoded within them. If the phrase isn’t completed correctly, a few pop-ups appear offering clues and context. It’s a brief education on Palestine, on the call for sovereignty and on why uniting under Palestine calls for interplanetary solidarity. 

Entry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Llmm2Og9xNE

No Entry Demo: https://youtu.be/A2S1ON2JWqU

What informs your thinking about (counter-)archive work?

DJ: Historically speaking, institutional archives have been sites of erasure and capture, not sovereignty. It has been wielded as a means of asserting dominion over property and people, a fundamental instrument for supporting colonial projects and the carceral state. 

Counter-archives, for me, are about memory work that reimagines methodologies of collection as well as methods of distribution in ways that are relational to community knowledge. And being okay with ephemerality.

In my creative practice, I’m less oriented toward preservation, though I deeply respect the labor it takes. It’s simply a distinct practice. I’m grateful for the work of Dorothy Berry’s The House Archives Built and Other Thoughts on Black Archival Possibilities and We Here, for making that labor legible—and for the field of critical BIPOC archivists, changing the field for the better. I encourage artists who are interested in “the archive” to learn from them.

Coming from popular education and interactive technology, I’m interested in speculating about different encounters with repositories in which information architectures don’t rely on vertical files or computer screens. Ones facilitated through physical computation, mirroring the ways plants and seeds store and share information. So much memory work was never meant for the archives, and archives don’t have a monopoly over how memory is transmitted.

What are your plans for Earthseed 3.0? How do you hope to advance this project during this residency? What does this residency allow you to do to build upon this work? 

DJ: I’m currently preparing for a fall exhibition at Flux IV, a project space by Flux Factory, as part of the Rhizome Fellowship showcase scheduled for the end of September 2026.

This iteration is anchored by a collaboration with Ayni Herb Farm. The founder, Amara Ullauri, is a longtime friend and farmer. We met in NYC community gardens, and they invited me to lead a workshop as part of their series, Runa Pacha. This iteration will invite more stories in, particularly from land workers, with Amara’s story featured alongside additional land worker friends.

Last November, I had the chance to introduce the structure at Ayni’s annual Garlic Fest, held inside a greenhouse beside a beautiful community market that raises funds for Palestinian and Sudanese farmers. It was a first feel for what needs adjusting when the work moves into community settings and outdoors. So far in the process, I’ve been thinking through how to adapt the protocols and build more flexible systems for community collaboration. 

The residency is giving me space to sit with questions I haven’t had time for. How might the access protocols shift depending on context? When are they actually not necessary? What would it take for Earthseed to work outdoors? How can I evolve the look and feel using different materials while keeping the same base architecture? 

I’m also exploring whether to move the tech onto a Raspberry Pi for iterations where a computer isn’t available, and thinking through lo-fi parafictive methods that could situate the archive in a speculative way without relying on a website that had done that work prior.

What does speculating on plurality mean to you?

DJ: Plurality, for me, is about survival. It’s an old practice that was interrupted. Much like biodiversity, it is a strategy for resilience.

The Andes cultivated thousands of varieties of potato over millennia. When the potato reached Ireland, after contact with the Americas and under conditions of English occupation, only one variety was planted. And while it provided survival food that could grow efficiently with minimal land, that monoculture left the crop catastrophically vulnerable when disease came. Monocultures set us up for famines of all kinds.

Speculating on plurality, for me, is about picking up the Zapatistas’ call: un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos, a world where many worlds fit. They teach us that honoring diverse cosmologies is not a matter of representation. It requires shaping the material conditions and infrastructure that allow many worlds and stories to actually coexist. In the age of tech, where we are drowning in information and starving for wisdom, I’m curious about diverse tactics for knowledge transmission.

Earthseed is my offering for imagining new tactics. A sandbox for prototyping forms to keep curiosity alive in our changing algorithmic environments.