Un Nuevo Camino was created for the 2025 Burning Man event. As ICE immigration raids started making headlines, the piece evolved to be a bold statement about the plight of refugees. Collaborating with the artist to help tell this story, I created video content that played inside the astronauts’ helmet visors. Drawing from traditional Puerto Rican art motifs featured in the mother’s facial tattoos, I developed a dialogue-free narrative arc featuring displaced space travellers.

Because the video was displayed through LED spinners inside the helmets rather than on a high-resolution screen, character clarity and visual consistency became especially important. The challenge was to communicate emotion, story, and world-building in an extremely compressed format.

Watching people at Burning Man stop, pull out their phones, and film the piece was incredibly rewarding. The installation was later exhibited at Burning Man Decompression in Oakland, where I was able to further refine the helmet visuals, incorporating both Rivera’s evolving narrative ideas and my own growing understanding of the medium’s creative possibilities.

Photography by & (c) Duncan Rawlinson