attending to the wound: a wake, a waiting, a witnessing
collaborative Performance with Jackie Amezquita // 23:49 min
Documentation provided by LACE
"We can consider the metaphysical “injury” a laceration and a hieroglyph. What is “stripped” or ruptured leaves a mark—a sign of destruction that is itself a “witness” of the violation. As witness, the sign itself bears a tragic testimony, a recounting of the violence. But what is the sign communicating? The sign, the laceration, becomes a hieroglyph open to a cultural reading and hermeneutical practice. While what it says is not easily interpreted, it can be felt or registered on a different plane of existence." Calvin Warren, Black Care
"The laceration speaks through symbolic substitutions across time, across generations… One cannot capture it exactly as it moves across generations, but the metaphysical harm it indexes is felt deeply...But, wake work wants to re-imagine care, not as the institutionalization of management strategies, but as a “wake, waiting, a witnessing” of the always already dead thing.” Calvin Warren, Black Care
attending to the wound: a wake, a waiting, a witnessing is performance activating a collaborative installation Hieroglyphs of metaphysical lacerations, and drawing from previous works A Poetic of Living and Sueños Fértiles. Using Black Care by Calvin Warren as a point of departure, the performance starts at sunset and works through grief, solidarity, and transferring of weight. The performance addresses the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
The activated installation combines LA and VA soil. Within the soil carpet connecting both sides of the gallery are soil body casts of each artists arranged like a compass and pointing in the direction of our migration paths. The LA soil is from Boyle heights and Ladera Heights, and the VA soil from Pen park, a former antebellum plantation and now recreation park. Within the soil bodies, salt crystals are embedded using the clothing of people in our family across generations. The salt crystals act as keloids and body adornments — highlighting sites of generational trauma and healing our bodies have overcome.