Some stories don’t shout. They don’t demand attention with spectacle or noise.
Instead, they glimmer quietly—like sunlight on water—inviting you to come closer, to feel rather than just see.
That’s exactly what Disney Agsam achieves with TUKIBA, a deeply reflective, multimedia thesis exhibit centered on the fisherfolk of Valladolid and their intimate connection to the sea.
“I was moved by their quiet strength—the way they live with the tides, not against them,” Disney shares. “Their livelihood revolves around harvesting angel wing clams. Fragile, yet resilient—just like them.”
Those clams became the heartbeat of TUKIBA, a project that resists the flattening effect of “representation” and instead invites immersion. Disney didn’t just want to show life by the water—they wanted you to enter it, to feel the weight and rhythm of that existence.
Through trompe-l’œil painting, Disney blurs the line between real and imagined, coaxing viewers into a dreamlike seascape. But it doesn’t stop there. A round plastic basin—humble and domestic—is reimagined with water and light, turning the familiar into the sacred. In this way, the exhibit doesn’t sit still on walls—it lives in space, echoing the fluid, unpredictable, breathing world of those it honors.
“Painting captured memory. Installation invited interaction. And light became a symbol for resilience and transformation,” Disney explains. “This wasn’t just about creating an image—it was about creating an environment.”
It’s also a mirror—held up not only to a community of laborers often overlooked, but to all of us. TUKIBA is an act of empathy, a quiet protest against forgetting, and a call to recognize the dignity of work that sustains both people and ecosystems.
The message isn’t loud. It doesn’t need to be.
“Resilience,” Disney says, “is not loud. It’s found in everyday gestures of care, in the capacity to adapt, and in remaining rooted even as tides shift.”
To step into Tukiba is to be reminded that strength isn’t always muscular. Sometimes it looks like weathered hands submerged in silt. Sometimes it sounds like silence at low tide. And sometimes it glows in the gentle way light moves across a basin filled with water and memory.
Disney Agsam has given us a work that doesn’t ask us to look—it asks us to listen.
And if we do, we might just hear something ancient, soft, and powerful rising up from below the surface.