“The Sea is a House” lives in a liminal state, between Puerto Rico and Canada. Carrying waves of memory—of a place and culture slowly tearing apart. From a distance, you begin to see the waves not as isolated gestures, but as part of a larger collective force. The moon's gravitational pull informs the tides and currents. Can The Sea is a House help us understand how waves are formed? Can it hold space for grief, growth and motion, for rupture and return? 

Maru Aponte’s practice and artist books shape how the world can be seen—how one can fold a memory, carry it with them, and open it again. In The Sea is a House, Aponte explores how the fold, the tear, and the texture of paper can reconfigure memory, reshaping the landscapes that are familiar to them. 

As part of their artist residency at the AGO, Maru Aponte has created large-scale paper sculptures and handmade paper, produced collaboratively through a series of youth workshops. The scale of the work invites the viewer to walk around it, to approach it slowly. The first encounter matters: you don’t know what’s waiting on the other side of the fold. As you move with it, as you become acclimated, you begin to experience something more local, intimate, specific. 

With the intention of creating a metaphorical house, youth were invited to create paper by hand, adding layers of colour, texture, & narrative. Each participant contributed to the basis of shared construction by applying a layer to the floor using a lamination process. It started by providing shaped stencils, but as things progressed, youth started making their own. Our home is now expanding with many hands and rhythms; every piece of paper is a step forward, or an imagined space.  

We're constructing something collective here in Toronto, bound together by care, fiber, and water.