Karlo Andrei Ibarra's proposal is based on a paradox: a meteorite that falls on the world and, instead of destroying it, rebuilds it. With this image, he structures a set of pieces where cartography loses its alleged objectivity. Maps, compasses, and atlases cease to be neutral tools and reveal themselves for what they have always been: instruments at the service of conquest, extraction, and control projects. 

His relationship with maps is not new. Since 2005, Karlo has conceived them as skins subjected to historical mutations. In his early photographic records, he documented structures in ruins and decay, as material traces of time. Today, that intuition appears in a broader sense: maps reconstructed with layers of colonial buildings of San Juan, turned into architectural palimpsests that show a flexible geography, made of memory. These reassembled cartographies point to a territory that is not fixed, marked by violence, but open to different interpretations.

The atlas crushed and turned into stardust, the compass without cardinal points, or the concrete military boots weighing down on the continent, condense the critique towards cartography as an emblem of Modernity. As Farinelli and Mignolo pointed out, maps not only represented the earth, they also colonized imaginaries, replacing the territory and taking its representation as real. Karlo takes up this tradition of “counter-mapping” and shifts it to the realm of the visual metaphor. His works denounce the persistence of coloniality and, at the same time, test new coordinates.

From Puerto Rico—an unincorporated territory, politically and economically subordinate to the United States—the maneuver is incisive. By disrupting the inherited geography, the meteorite symbolizes not only catastrophe, but also the possibility of imagining a space for invention: constellations instead of borders, mobile coordinates instead of imposed limits. Like any reparation practice, it destroys and remakes.