Chiara Analice Caballero Chimera—sometimes known as Soco, Collective, Tempest, Aries, Trinity, or Chi—creates from a life that refuses containment. Born in Puerto Rico, raised in Tucson, Arizona, and shaped by the mist and rebellion of the Pacific Northwest, her cultural identity is layered, nonlinear, and inseparable from her art. Both of her parents are Puerto Rican: one a Nuyorican with Irish and Sicilian ancestry, the other carrying the deep cadence of the island in his voice. 
 

Chiara’s artistic practice is marked by experimentation and defiance of category. She has lit paintings on fire to work with the remains, painted on shoes and velvet, folded paper until creases became fault lines of revelation. Her current focus is encaustic work—spells embedded in wax, textured surfaces that hold presence rather than perfection. Her pieces channel ancestral memory, karmic weight, and the fractured beauty of survival. Some works are too intense for ordinary living spaces, demanding solitude; others become testimonies, such as Centurion Parade, her forthcoming zine about psychosis, incarceration, and the fragile, radiant act of recovery.
 

Her portfolio has been described as the work of seven different artists. What once felt like criticism has become a mark of honor: each facet of her psyche, each voice, is given its own brush. She works with her mind as collaborator, not adversary—living with PTSD, Bipolar Disorder, and Dissociative Disorder, yet treating these states as teachers rather than cages. “To neglect is to silence,” she says, “and that oppressive silence devours.”
 

Chiara feels deeply about standing with those who need support most. Her heart is tethered to women, children, animals, immigrants, folks with mental health and substance use issues, and the BIPOC community—those most often dismissed, endangered, or unheard. 

 

Her work invites you to pause, reflect, and recognize your own power. It is an act of transmutation: a reminder that even under systems built to oppress, humans create beauty, resistance, and new worlds. Through her practice, she hopes to whisper across the threshold of silence: you are powerful, you are not alone, you too are a Creator, fashioned after Source.