Our proposal for Art Basel Miami Beach 2025 brings together five artists whose practices, although different in their material approach and narrative focus, converge in a common investigation of how images, gestures, and cultural memories are constructed and negotiated in the contemporary world. Ariamna Contino, Roberto Diago, Diana Fonseca, Orestes Hernández, and Miki Leal each respond to the urgencies of their respective contexts through processes that reveal the aesthetic, political, and emotional layers embedded in everyday experience.

Ariamna Contino's work opens the project with a quiet but incisive reflection on the fragility of social and ecological systems. Through her meticulous hand-cut paper pieces, she transforms landscapes and cartographic exercises into tactile, meditative objects that reveal the subtle tensions between human presence and the environments we inhabit. Her practice establishes a visual strategy where precision becomes a form of resistance: a slow, contemplative gesture in the face of accelerated consumption and the erosion of the spaces we occupy.

Roberto Diago expands on this sensitivity with a body of work that confronts the historical and current realities of racialization. Using the material languages of construction—wood, soot, found objects—his pieces function both as memorials and statements. Diago reconfigures the scars of the Afro-descendant experience into architectures of persistence, offering a counter-archive that refuses to be erased.

Diana Fonseca approaches everyday life from another form of subversion. Her works explore the poetry—and contradictions—of urban life, fragmenting and recomposing found surfaces, personal memories, and popular imagery. Through these layers, Fonseca reveals the instability of what we assume to be permanent, proposing the city as an organism in constant negotiation.

The playful yet unsettling universe of Orestes Hernández introduces an altered psychological dimension to the whole. His hybrid characters—part fable, part digital myth—reflect the dislocations of contemporary subjectivity. By merging childhood imaginaries with the visual noise of the digital age, Hernández exposes the strategies we invent to navigate vulnerability, fear, and desire.

Finally, Miki Leal's practice brings a chromatic and compositional breadth that anchors the project in a broader dialogue with painting. Her references—from literature to jazz, from design to cinema—unfold in visual environments where intuition and structure coexist. Leal's work highlights the productive frictions between personal narrative and cultural history.

Together, these five artists articulate a vision of contemporaneity based on sensitivity and critical awareness. Their works trace the ways in which individuals inhabit, resist, and transform the symbolic architectures that shape our collective life.