Ocupando Grietas is a critical and speculative exploration of the potential of Magical Realism to bridge epistemological gaps in creative practices. Through an art-based approach, it proposes a framework that challenges hegemonic Eurocentric narratives while advocating for a critical, decolonial, and intersectional approach to design and other creative fields. Rooted in the Latin American expression of the genre, the project traces the historical emergence of storytelling as a response to the region’s socio-political landscape, examining literature as a site of resistance and the agency of the author in shaping context. In doing so, it draws parallels between these fields and positions Magical Realism within the realm of the critical and the speculative.

Resisting binaries, and through a perpetual series of mutually informing negotiations, the project materializes as an interactive installation that reimagines Magical Realism as a physical set of design principles, provocations, and actionable strategies. It is presented as an intervenable canvas, accompanied by five guiding booklets, a manifesto, and a set of tools such as sewing kits, pens, markers, scissors, and paper, making the canvas available for participants to co-create meaning through their own cultural productions, lived experiences, and ways of seeing and knowing. This piece proposes a return to alternative ways of thinking, creating, and storytelling as acts of resistance, and to the agency of the creative as both agent and medium to inhabit the in-betweens.