yo soy aquí / i am here is a collaborative exhibition that is the result of a nine-month conversation between the artists Adrian​ ​Aguilera​ and Betelhem​ ​Makonnen​. Deliberately playing with the Spanish language’s distinction between “estar” and “ser” as different understandings of the verb “to be”, Aguilera and Makonnen present works in collage, objects, video, and multimedia installation that proposes an ontological, as well as a spatial exploration of our relationship to here (space + time).

In their exhibition “yo soy aquí / i am here”, Aguilera and Makonnen appropriate NASA images in order to connect what was originally meant as omnipotent documentation of our planet to a more holistic view of our “Spaceship Earth”, reminding us that we are all fellow passengers on this spinning rock, swinging through the solar system on a spiral arm of the Milky Way as it hurls through a starry universe. Pulling from history, physics, diasporic time travel and the dialogue between analogue and digital, Aguilera and Makonnen share with us the immigrant perspective: constant translation, multiple realities, colliding rocks making worlds — the stuff of creation, of an unfamiliar existence emerging from what used to be absolute. Reality is discrete, mutable and born of interaction.