The works
SITE – SIDE – SIGHT WALKS unfolds through a growing body of works, emerging from encounters with Aruba’s Indigenous rock drawing sites.
SITE – SIDE – SIGHT WALKS Installation view, National Archaeological Museum Aruba, 2026
Across Aruba, 33 sites with Indigenous rock drawings are known, holding a total of 485 documented drawings. The project does not seek to document them all, but grows through the sites I am able to encounter and experience through walking.
The encounters take different forms: boxes, glass works, engraved glass plates and poetry. Each carries a part of the journey — the encounter with the site, its artistic translation, and the reflection that followed.
Poems
The three layers of SITE – SIDE – SIGHT first emerged through writing these poems and finding their titles. They became the foundation of the project — a way of walking, working and seeing.
SITEWALK, Siribana, Aruba
SIDEWALK, Piedra Plat, Aruba
SIGHTWALK, Canashito, Aruba
SITE is the physical encounter — walking through the landscape, standing face to face with the rock drawings, and experiencing what a place evokes.
SIDE is about walking side by side — talking, listening and learning from one another, and in doing so, learning about ourselves. It is also about taking the side path rather than the highway: slowing down, allowing more time and space to observe and reflect.
SIGHT is about insight — what can emerge when we become still. Sometimes an insight breaks through during or after an encounter with a site, or while working at the torch. It opens questions about what we want to leave behind and which path we choose to follow.
SITE – SIDE – SIGHT boxes
Voices from Aruba
Voices from Aruba brings together words written by people in Aruba about the Indigenous rock drawings and what they mean to them, and to the island.
Words spoken disappear. Ink on paper fades. Engraved in glass, these words seem permanent. Yet what appears on the wall is not the engraving itself, but its shadow — a reminder that even what seems made to last can disappear, just as the rock drawings themselves can fade, erode or be lost.
