El lugar de la morada, by Puerto Rican artist Edra Soto, is part of a profound reflection on the Puerto Rican diasporic experience.

Based in Chicago for the past thirty years, Soto has developed a solid artistic career centered on works that, in the artist’s own words, “explore the intimate value of working-class residential architecture, highlighting its decorative motifs as symbols of memory and resilience.” Her work examines a heritage often sidelined by official discourses, dominant narratives, and the social structures that have shaped the country’s cultural history.

“I work at the intersection of architectural language and social practice, fostering conversations about historical structures, diasporic identity, memory, and loss. Expanding on my fusion of architectural interventions, interpersonal interactions, and archival exploration, this new project uses the geometric abstractions of Puerto Rican residential motifs to reveal intertwined personal memories and a secular humanism,” says Soto.

Regarding the proposal, curator Juan Carlos López Quintero notes: “His work invites us to look through that fractal geometry—which has its roots in Africa, as architectural historians well demonstrate, and which elegantly embellishes vernacular housing through railings, brick walls, grilles, and sunshades—in order to literally delve into the collective imagination of a people.”.

The exhibition also includes works by four artists invited by Soto: Nora Maité Nieves, Ada del Pilar Ortiz, Marisol Ruiz, and Natalia Sánchez, whose aesthetic proposals also engage in dialogue with architecture. Together, they form an open and inclusive conversation about the urban landscape and new ways of understanding this theme within contemporary Puerto Rican art.

The sample is part of Regresos / Homeward Bound, a series started in 2023 that brings contemporary artists from our diaspora back to Puerto Rico.