Endemic Shield is the heart of Yctyogenesis — the work that condenses its origin, identity, and foundational myth. In this piece, Aurelio Milera composes a mosaic of Cuban endemic fish and hybrid marine forms, fusing them into a single protective structure that reads like a totem, a relic, and an ancestral memory.

The shield embodies the artist’s biological and emotional lineage: childhood expeditions along Cuba’s coasts with his father, the living geography of the island, and the idea that identity is constructed from species, memories, and landscapes that inhabit us. Each segment of this hybrid body interlocks like a collective organism — a speculative genetic map where evolution and autobiography become inseparable.

In this universe, the shield is not a weapon, but an origin: a synthesis of Cuba, the ocean, the endemic, and the intimate. It stands as the symbolic core of Yctyogenesis and the work that crystallized Milera’s entire vision of this alternate evolutionary world.