VOLADORAS

SELECTED FOR THE XXX BIENNIAL 

An installation that captures the everyday wisdom found on the windows of public buses in Dominican Republic. These short messages full of humor, tributes, advice, or faith become part of the city's oral and visual heritage.  The project raises these everyday sayings to the status of a street cultural archive, highlighting how Dominican identity is also shaped through snippets of urban life that travel with the daily traffic jams, reminding us that knowledge takes many forms and that the street is a vibrant space for collective thought.

Across the Dominican Republic, voladoras are privately operated minibuses that move continuously through the city, connecting neighborhoods by routes shaped as much by daily demand as by official infrastructure. Known for their speed, improvised stops, and handwritten destination signs, they occupy a space between formal transit and informal urban choreography. 

Their name is derived from the Spanish verb volar ("to fly") and it references the urgency with which they navigate the streets, a quality that has become embedded in Dominican popular culture and language. The term is formally recognized in the Diccionario de americanismos as a Dominican word for a small bus driven recklessly.

The project elevates these everyday phrases to the status of a cultural archive of the street, revealing how Dominican identity is also written through the urban fragments that accompany the daily traffic jam. In doing so, it suggests that knowledge circulates in multiple forms and that the street is a legitimate site for the production of collective thought.