10/24/2025
Dwelling at the Pietra Prize 2025: A Study in Shared Authorship
written by Troi Santos October 22, 2025
Dwelling appears simple at first, a yellow dress suspended inside a mosquito net, the word “Hogar” embroidered in red above. Step inside, and the space shifts. The net becomes an invisible threshold, holding light, air, and the faint rustle of paper. Each handwritten note pinned to the net adds another voice. What seems fragile reveals itself as a shared memory structure, an archive of touch, thought, and home.
Presented for the 2025 Pietra Prize at The Factory, this collaborative installation by Ged Merino and Olena Jennings brings together fabric, memory, and participation. The mosquito net, familiar in tropical and immigrant homes, turns into a frame for connection. Viewers are invited to enter, to read, to leave a mark. The work gathers these gestures, forming a living conversation about belonging and distance.
Curator Cristián Pietrapiana conceived the Pietra Prize as a tribute to collaboration, honoring his father, Albert Pietra, who valued teamwork and craftsmanship. Here, that spirit is literal. Merino and Jennings work not as merged voices but as two individuals meeting through fabric. Jennings embroidered a memory of her childhood home on the front of the dress. At the same time, Merino reuses mosquito netting and domestic textiles to build an enclosure that is both sculpture and shelter. Their combined gesture transforms common materials into a meditation on home and migration.
Kulambo
Merino’s use of the mosquito net recalls his Filipino background, where the kulambo is a nightly ritual, an object of comfort, protection, and intimacy. The handwritten Tagalog note pinned outside, “Ang kulambo ay tahanan ng alaala at panaginip,” meaning “The mosquito net is a home of memory and dreams,” situates the work in that lineage. Jennings, a Ukrainian American writer and artist, brings her own domestic imagery: embroidered houses, floral sleeves, patterns from kitchens remembered. Between them, the artists weave a shared vocabulary of care and displacement.
Each piece of fabric carries a history. Each note, written by a visitor, alters the work’s meaning. The installation expands through participation, echoing Lucy Lippard’s idea that art’s value can lie in process and exchange. Here, the process is the artwork. The accumulation of notes and textures turns the mosquito net into a collective diary. Every fold, every mark, records the human impulse to belong.
The curatorial choice to let the installation float within a bare white space heightens its quiet power. The translucent blue mesh filters light, softening edges and sound. Visitors instinctively move slowly, aware of their bodies within this delicate structure. Inside, the gallery becomes a home of its own. The shift from public to personal happens without walls, only through air and thread.
Shared labor
Dwelling also reclaims the textile’s place in art history. Fabric, long tied to women’s work, becomes here a conceptual and spatial material. The net, stretched in tension, achieves sculptural weight while keeping its association with nurturing and care. The yellow dress, empty and still, holds presence through absence, a body remembered but not seen. Jennings’s embroidered outline of a house becomes a witness to shared labor, a quiet monument to the unseen work of making a home.
Merino has long treated fabric as language. Reuse, stitching, and layering function as sentences of memory. In Dwelling, this approach deepens through Jennings’s collaboration. The work’s temporal layers — Filipino past, Ukrainian past, and New York present — are stitched together into one fragile, participatory space.
Participation completes the piece. Notes pinned by viewers, confessions, prayers, and fragments of thought extend the work’s life. It becomes both archive and organism, an artwork that breathes with interaction. Meaning is co-authored by those who enter. The installation resists permanence, embracing change. As more notes gather, the mosquito net bends, subtly reshaped by human contact.
Nothing is Hidden
Every element inside Dwelling performs a museum role. The mosquito net acts as vitrine and architecture, the dress as artifact, the notes as interpretive labels written by the public. Merino and Jennings create a micro museum, intimate and inclusive. Rather than explaining the meaning, they invite participation, allowing the public to write it in real time. Imperfections, slight asymmetry, uneven handwriting, and shifting threads are part of its integrity. These marks make the piece alive.
In Dwelling, imperfection signals honesty. Nothing is hidden. The seams, knots, and folds remain visible, resisting polish. The work asks the museum to be equally open, a space where memory is porous and participation is welcome. The mosquito net moves slightly with air, a reminder that art, like home, depends on breath.
Empathy and Harmony
Ultimately, Dwelling is less about a physical house than about the act of creating one. The word “Hogar,” Spanish for home, glows in red thread above the yellow dress. It carries echoes of bahay in Tagalog, dim in Ukrainian, and home in English, each a word for safety and loss. Visitors step into this multilingual space, contribute their own fragments, and leave changed.
Through modest means, Ged Merino and Olena Jennings build a structure of empathy and memory. Their work shows that collaboration can be as simple and profound as sharing fabric, story, and time. Inside Dwelling, the familiar becomes sacred, the personal becomes collective, and the act of Dwelling together becomes the art itself.
