Always to the stars
Year V · 2026Conceptual artist, textile painter, social sculptor. The practice moves across installation, wearable art, and site-specific work — held together by a single question about how a material can carry a life.
Founder of UKENA, the wearable-art line made in Bali. Founder of OU Studio, the creative direction practice that serves a small number of long engagements at a time. Based between Bali and Berlin.
Ad Sidera Semper has never been only a festival. It is a return — built in the week after El Capitán's birthday, on a coast that holds no distraction from what actually matters. Five editions have made the gesture real. Year V is the year to give the art dimension the same weight as the music.
The festival's first four editions established the music, the holistic layer, the nature setting, the community. Year V is when art truly enters — not as decoration, not as backdrop, but as a participant with its own logic, its own objects, its own portal into the week.
Wellness, ceremony and nature already share that intention. The art layer enters at par, not above. The outreach — the school in Bocas, the structural giving-back — is the same gesture turned outward. The festival, the artwork, the community, the week: one piece, many parts.
That is the proposal.
The sarong is the object that leaves with the guest. It is also the object that lets the festival continue after the music ends.
Designed for Year V, screen-printed in-house on linen, the sarong holds a pattern composed from El Capitán's life — places, years, gestures, the dates the festival has spent five editions honouring. It functions as clothing on the body, as a wall piece at home, as a marker that the wearer was there.
It is the first surface of a larger work. The next section describes what that larger work is.
What you have been doing for five years is already a kind of artwork in your father's name. The festival is the act of remembrance. Year V is the year we make a second piece — one that travels.
In 2024 I built a work called CINIS. Two hundred and fifty sarongs were distributed at a wedding, each one carrying a fragment of the couple's story. A companion site at cinis.love holds the whole work. The site is programmed to fade when both people have died. Until then, every guest who wears the sarong — at a beach, in a kitchen, traveling — adds to the record that lives there. The 250 sarongs are not an edition. They are the same work, distributed across 250 lives.
The method works for a marriage because a marriage is a beginning. The same method, transposed, works for a life remembered.
For El Capitán, the proposition is this: every sarong handed out at Year V carries a fragment of his life — the years, the places, the family, the gestures the festival has spent five editions honoring. A companion site holds the whole work. Guests who wear the sarong post photos there over the years. The work grows. People who never met him become part of the record that keeps his life moving across the world.
This is not a marketing exercise. It is a continuing artwork in your father's name, with the festival as its origin gathering. Year V is its first edition. Years VI through X expand it — additional sarongs each year, accumulated photos, more lives carrying the story.
The piece is one work with many parts. However many sarongs are made, they are not separate objects — they are the same work, distributed. The companion site is the place where the work continues to exist after the festival ends. Together they form a single ongoing artwork — the second instance of the CINIS method, transposed from love to legacy.
Reference: cinis.love — the precedent work, still active.
Two parallel bodies of work for Year V — one priced for mid-collectors who want to live with the festival year-round, one for full collectors who want to hold its full intensity. Both are conceived as part of a multi-year canon that grows edition by edition.
Mid-collector grade. Five compositions, ten editions each. Linen ground, mixed media. Year I of a multi-year series — each subsequent year adds a new work, deepens the field.
Full collector grade. Five unique works, no editions. Larger scale, deeper register — the works that hold the festival's most concentrated material. Year I of a five-year arc, paced one edition per festival.
Exhibition strategy: a pre-festival show in Panama City the week before Year V; selected works installed on site for the festival itself; the full series available through the gallery network through 2027.
Bocas del Toro is not a backdrop. It is the community that lets the festival arrive. The outreach layer makes that visible — a workshop with a Bocas school in the week before the festival, a wall painted together with the children, materials provided, the work documented.
Fifteen percent of every sale at Year V — sarongs, capsule, artworks, merchandise — goes structurally to the workshop, the school, and the materials. Not as a discount on the art. As the price the work pays the place that holds it.
This is the year the festival writes that structure into the work. From Year V forward, the giving-back is part of the price, listed on the proposal, not added as an afterthought.
15% · structural · year V onwardThree moments during the week itself. Each is small. Each is for the people already at Year V. Together they make the art layer a thing attendees enter, not a thing they look at from outside.
A half-day session with festival attendees — material, gesture, the practice of letting a cloth hold a story. Twenty seats, by signup, included with Constelación + Ad Sidera shapes.
An evening conversation on the night of the vernissage — the work, the method, the question of art as participant. Open to the full festival audience.
The on-site unveiling of the Year V works. The artworks installed, the sarongs ready, the companion site live. The festival's art layer opens for the week.
The festival's photography is real. The current website does not yet hold it at the level it deserves. Year V is also the moment to rebuild the site that carries the festival into the world — built with Michael Berwin (web specialist, long-time collaborator), on the same stack the OLEVERSE coheres on: Astro 6 + Tailwind v4 + Sanity v4.
A short audit of the current site, used as data, not as critique:
What's working visually — the photography itself. The festival has a real archive. The new site starts there:
A sketch of where the festival site could go — final design developed together if you greenlight the rebuild.
The website is one surface in a multi-year canon. Year V begins it. Years VI through X carry it forward — the same hand, the same logic, the artwork growing year by year. If this engagement is right, it is built to hold for ten.
Not tiers. Shapes — each one composed of a different set of layers, each complete in itself. Prices are creative-direction fees in USD. Production (sarongs, capsule, merch, artwork) is a separate stream and discussed directly.
I'm building Year V to hold for ten. If you want it to hold for one, I build it differently — tell me which.
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