Descendencia, Agencia (Descendancy, Agency) is a performance piece about the memories carried by those of the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade into the lands that would come to be called the New World. In the piece, I utilize the objects of shackles, clay, feathers, and sugar cane to move through the haunting of enslavement and its afterlives. Using a series of actions (like cutting the sugar cane with a machete), and covering my body in wet clay, with the help of an assistant, I invert the gaze and the site of agency for the memory of the various faces of enslavement. Using embodiment practices of anger and dignity, I ask how we resignify ancestral memories of dehumanization to source the profound power of this descendancy.
Bogotá, Colombia 2015
