The altar is composed of plaster molds created by Sydney Mieko King and I, and visitors to the installation. To create these molds, visitors engaged us in a dance practice that identifies grief in the body through activations of weight, momentum, and stillness; after, they create plaster molds to externalize this grief and to contribute to the altar. The installation further includes photographs of the molds and our bodies, projections of dances that reflect on grief, nostalgic soundscapes, and space for movement within.

Living Relics examines the precarity of BIPOC bodies, amplified by instances of death and loss that enshroud our daily life. As the pandemic stripped us of opportunities for communal morning, this work creates space for individuals to address the weight they carry. We ask: What experiences are you bringing with you? What memories and sensations? What grief? Living Relics focuses on making the immaterial physical, so that we can see it, touch it, and move forward with it.

Living Relics integrates my research in processing grief and communing with the dead through movement, and King’s work in understanding the body through investigations of surface, trace and photographic process. As collaborators - and in our individual practices - we take radical approaches to working with the body and contending with the stories buried within it.

Living Relics has been supported by Recess Art’s Sessions residency in January 2021 and BRIC’s BRICLab residency in March 2022.