To Life's Thread is a collaborative intermedial research-project combining performance, slow hand-work of dyeing wool, drawing, and thread making.

Through collective experimentation, performative gesture, and iterative practice with materials and space, To Life's Thread explores the rituals associated with both henna and achiote, tracing the reciprocal relations between them while contemplating the potential of recuperation, multicodedness, and decolonizing performance methods as a radical space for cultural transmission, a mediating form of memory, and as an enduring practice of cultural sustainability.

This research-creation project's use of translations as alternative modes and multicodedness allows us to bypass the colonial gaze while carrying the potential for collective agency embedded in these practices.

In The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, the performance scholar Diana Taylor writes about the vital role of our repertoire in the transmission of cultural memory and embodied knowledge across generations. These repertoires enact our embodied memory and cultural knowledge through ephemeral practices—performances, gestures, rituals, movement, dance, singing—which constitute non-reproducible knowledge (Taylor 2003). Taylor contrasts two epistemic systems: the repertoire—ephemeral, embodied, living—and the archive—documented, objectified, and potentially repeatable across time. The two are not mutually exclusive but reversible and deeply entangled. Taylor describes embodied performance practice as "multicoded" to acknowledge Indigenous rituals adopted and adapted after Conquest as a means to preserve, with variations, pre-Conquest customs and rituals.

Another form of performative gesture that has been explored draws on the notion of recuperation as a decolonial performance tactic that facilitates communal healing (Oviedo 2022). It involves imagining and performing something that occurred in the past, utilizing creative freedom to change how it is perceived, felt, or remembered. Multicodedness is used to describe cultural practices, performances, rituals, and ceremonies that move through multiple registers, politically and aesthetically, and where cultural meanings are transmitted through the convergence of spectators and participants in performative acts. Rituals, inscriptions, marking, thread making, untangling, and knotting become multidimensional, relational forms of expression, transcending individual marking and moving toward co-becoming and presence within a continuum of relations.

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The title to Life's thread is borrowed from Cecilia Vicuña's poem A Ritual response, whose lines became a choreographic proposition that guided this work. This collaborative work is open-ended, with our ideas and threads producing various materials. As an evolving project, these materials remain open to different modulations within our future installation.