The Underworld Construction Company is both a fictional corporation and an artistic framework. Emerging from my ongoing Passed Lives’ Excessive Future Foundation narrative, the Company operates at the thresholds of labor, infrastructure, and the supernatural. Its workers—dressed in safety orange and marked by high-visibility gear—embody the omnipresent yet often unseen figures who maintain the nation’s roadways, bridges, and medians.

In collaboration with the Department of Reflection (Misael Soto), the Company presented an hour-long demonstration of our Eden Construction Cones at the Wolfsonian-FIU. Eden Construction Cones reimagines the ubiquitous orange traffic cone as a symbol of both warning and possibility.

The title references “Eden” not as a lost paradise but as a perpetual zone of construction—an unfinished site where boundaries, pathways, and futures are continually negotiated. By relocating this everyday object into an art context, the work asks viewers to consider how even the most ordinary markers of infrastructure can point toward larger questions of access, labor, and the fragile architectures that shape public life.

Within this project, the Company functions as a metaphor for collective rebuilding and an allegory of haunting. Its presence suggests a world where everyday construction crews become emissaries from another realm: laborers who surface from highway shoulders and off-ramps, carrying the unfinished work of those lost in accidents and collapses.

By adopting the aesthetics of signage, logos, and corporate identity, the Underworld Construction Company blurs fact and fiction, proposing a speculative contractor tasked not just with repairing asphalt and concrete but with reconstructing memory, visibility, and the very map of America.