Celia Irina González

The project Looking with the Bone is a speculative video installation describing the human-chiton relationship. Chitons, also known as marine cockroaches, are mollusks with shells made of aragonite, a mineral that also forms stalactites. Chitons have thousands of microscopic eyes embedded in their shells. As a means of self-protection, chitons produce new eyes when they lose or damage existing ones while facing off a predator. These intertidal eyes have two lenses that can focus both in and out of the water. After centuries of exposure to the experiments of European modernity—the extermination of Indigenous populations, colonization, the forced relocation and enslavement of people, concentration camps, and totalitarian dictatorships—the Caribbean human has begun to mutate and gain “bone” eyes. The Caribbean human has made thousands of chiton-like eyes emerge from their body. They have learned to “look with the bone.” Looking with the Bone offers a critique of the terror-filled events that make up Caribbean history while simultaneously encouraging us to speculate about the future. How can we think of the sea as an extension of Caribbean territory and the human body as being in symbiotic mutation with marine beings?  

Celia Irina González lives and works in Mexico City. She holds a PhD in social anthropology from the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City and a master’s degree in visual anthropology from FLACSO Ecuador. She has participated in the exhibitions Emergent/cy at Entre Vienna in Austria; Cuba Dispersa (Cuba Dispersed) at Cranbrook Art Museum in Detroit; Arte Latinoamericano en la colección del MEIAC at Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo in Badajoz; Sin Authorización: Contemporary Cuban Art at the Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University in the City of New York; Ojos de hueso at Galería Angeles Baños in Badajoz; ESOK: Jakarta Bienniale; the Kochi-Muziris Bienniale in Kerala; the Cuban Pavilion at the Venice Bienniale; and Rendez-Vous at the Lyon Biennial. She has received a Botín Foundation Visual Art Grant and a Grants & Commissions Program award from the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO). She has been in residence at the Stiftung Reinbeckhallen residency program in Berlin; the El Ranchito Residency at Matadero Madrid in collaboration with Artista x Artista; a KulturKontakt Austria program residency in Vienna; and the Skills Bienniale hosted by Gray’s School of Art at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen. 

The 2025 CCI + WOPHA Fellowship is presented by PAMM’s Caribbean Cultural Institute in collaboration with Women Photographers International Archive and through the support of El Espacio 23.