NADA New York 2025

Tratado de Muchas Cuevas was the result of Javier Orfon’s participation in Cabachuelas Workshop, led by Alice Cheveres. Located in Morovis, in the north-central region of Puerto Rico, the Cabachuelas Workshop offers an enriching experience because it is a space that promotes the exchange of diverse areas of knowledge. Artists, writers, archaeologists, and other fans share their progressive ideas and reflect on the region’s cultural future. The Cabachuelas Workshop is located within a natural reserve comprising sixty caves. Alice Chevere is the custodian of a three thousand-year history of native Taino ancestral knowledge. Her determination to preserve and promote this knowledge defines the Taino resistance to vanishing from Puerto Rican cultural history. Orfon incorporated these experiences into his work, highlighting the importance of oral histories, the transmission of knowledge through words, popular thought, micro-accounts, and found objects (pieces discarded by other visitors) recovered from the area. In a sense, recovering contemporary objects from the site is a continuation of the archaeological process, but in present times.