We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Yapci Ramos. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Yapci below.

Yapci, appreciate you joining us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

The most meaningful project for me is ‘Monumenta. Nine Guanche Incarnations’, because it allowed me to give visibility to the Guanche woman —the Aboriginal woman from my homeland, Tenerife— absent from public space and relegated by patriarchal narratives.

For centuries, the representation of our pre-colonial past has been marked by idealized symbols and images, yet women were rendered invisible. In pre-Hispanic communities they were active subjects, not just figures associated with domestic life, and yet history reduced or erased them.

With ‘Monumenta’, I wanted to recover those forgotten voices and reimagine what they might have looked like, what feelings they experienced, what stories they would tell. Through artistic, historical, and social research, I developed nine identities inspired by the landscapes and oral traditions of the island’s ancient demarcations. The result was a series of 3D-printed sculptures accompanied by sound, conceived to occupy public space as an act of re-appropriation and subversion of established narratives.

This project is very special to me because it connects memory, territory, and gender; because it questions how historical and artistic heritage has been constructed; and because it opens up a necessary debate about the presence of women and subaltern identities in public space. For me, Monumenta is not only an artwork, but also a symbolic act of reparation.

Yapci, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I was born in the Canary Islands and I develop my artistic practice between New York, Barcelona, and the Canary Islands, although I am currently in New York as an artist-in-residence at NYU. This vital geography has shaped my gaze: I come from islands marked by mestizaje and colonization, with African and European roots, and from there I have learned to inhabit the world through hybridity, transit, and movement.

My work is installation-based and multidisciplinary, unfolding through photography, video, sound, sculpture, and performance. Each project always begins with a lived first-hand experience: I engage physically and emotionally in the process, so that the work is not just a representation, but an event that I go through and share.

From my earliest projects until today, identity, sexuality, and territory have been the core of my research. In ‘Parto’ (2024), I created a birth canal through which more than 14,000 people passed, experiencing the possibility of being “reborn.” In ‘Monumenta’ (2022), I embodied Guanche women —the Indigenous ancestors of the Canary Islands— to return them to public space through contemporary sculptures. In ‘Lloro’ (2021), I invited diverse people to cry in front of the camera, and that intimate gesture transformed into a collective chorus exhibited in an immersive format. And in ‘Red-Hot’ (2018), I wrote my fears and questions with menstrual blood in an intimate space, transforming fragility into power.

What characterizes me as an artist is the tension between the visceral and the poetic, the intimate and the social, the local and the global. My works emerge from deeply personal experiences —the desire for motherhood, grief, sexuality, the bond with my land— that open from the individual to the collective.

What satisfies me most is seeing the public recognize themselves in my pieces, finding in them a mirror or a space for catharsis. For me, art is a medium of research, healing, and communication; a vital necessity. And if I can share this with others, the work fully comes to life.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

I work with the body because it is the most honest territory from which I can speak. It is where memory, desires, fears, and also political struggles are inscribed. When I put my body at stake, I place myself in a space of vulnerability that becomes a shared strength. It is a way of saying: this runs through me, but it also runs through us as a community.

My works often function as rituals. One example is ‘Lloro’, which began as an intimate record of tears and transformed into a collective chorus. Another is ‘Parto’, which turned my own grief around motherhood into a passage traveled by thousands of people, confronting their own desires and limits. What matters is not only the gesture, but the possibility for the spectator to complete the work through their own experience.

I do not seek to give answers. I pose questions that spark reflection. I believe in the power of art to make visible what has been silenced, to repair historical absences, and to propose new ways of being in the world.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

One story that illustrates my resilience is ‘In Transition’ (2024). The work reflects a moment of metamorphosis into another vital state —a rebirth that emerges from the ashes, at once painful and liberating, transforming both body and identity.

As part of the process, I undertook a three-hour performative ritual of ‘mummification’, in which I remained motionless, covered in layers of material that recorded the impressions of the experience. This demanded endurance, stillness, and vulnerability, and taught me that resilience is not about resisting change, but about surrendering to transformation and allowing it to reshape you.

The installation that resulted —a resin body illuminated over volcanic sand, with light responsive to sound and accompanied by Silbo Gomero, the ancestral whistled language of La Gomera— brought together memory, territory, and the collective voice. For me, resilience means embracing these thresholds of transition, trusting the process of becoming, and discovering the strength to emerge more luminous and renewed.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.yapciramos.com/
• Instagram: @yapciramos
• Facebook: Yapci Ramos
• Linkedin: Yapci Ramos
• Youtube: @yapciramosartist
• Other: https://linktr.ee/yapciramosartist

Image Credits

1- Monumenta

2- Monumenta

3- Parto

4- Parto

5- In Transition

6- In Transition

7- Red-Hot

8- Lloro