to Life's thread

 

A collaborative intermedial project combining performance, slow hand-work of dyeing wool**, thread making, untangling, and threading. In this collaborative space, I have been drawn to 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.

 

Through these collaborative experimental translations, I've been interested in how adopting alternative modes through multicodedness allows us to bypass the colonial gaze while carrying the potential for collective agency embedded in these practices. I've been thinking about "recuperation" (Marlon Jiménez Oviedo) as a decolonial performance tactic that facilitates communal healing. 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—where cultural meanings are transmitted through the convergence of spectators and participants in performative acts.

In this collaborative work, tangible, virtual, and digital inscriptions are performed and intertwined across materials and space. The remains of our performative making, including the dyed wool threads and video documentation, have been decoded into a cinematic haptic experience, translating gestures into light forms that appear and disappear. 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.

Our collaborative project involved several performative processes that produced various materials which we are interested in incorporating into an installation, including photographic work, video, projection, drawing scrolls, and threads.

 

 

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.

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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.