This performance was created at the beginning of the pandemic, coinciding with two personal loses.

In the video, I am tracing the face of a spirit being in the sand, while the waves’ natural ebb and flow erase his shape. The incoming waves interrupt the act of tracing yet it is this interruption that makes the act endless, making the spirit being ever-lasting yet anonymous.

The location of the video is at Bottle Neck beach at the southern tip of the Brooklyn waterfront, also known as Dead Horse bay, serving as the final location for the city’s horse carcasses which were later processed into fertilizer and glue.

This is a healing and purification ritual, a limpia for the land. The ritual honors the beach and by calling in a spirit being, the beach is cleansed from its industrial/colonial history; while also cleansing and honoring my own loss.

This beach is engulfed with glass, making it nearly impossible to walk without been cut, the act of walking slowly allowed me trace the face of the spirit on the sand and embody my grief without running away from it; knowing that it is kindness with the land, with my body, that is needed to honor what has come to pass.

As the glass is native to the sand, pain is also native to the human soul, we live in a culture that revers the ancestors, but fears death, yet, for ancestors to become ancestors, death must come first.

This ritual honors the land, and the life of those who are now our ancestors; it is also a meditation on death, reparation, and that, which rises from their memory.

Ash.

Ase,

Asé,

Ashe.