Performance Archive - Photography, 2020

 

This work relates to the social injustices and killings of Black bodies in the hands of Law Enforcement. This injustices, violence and racism broadly at daylight and night, endanger Black existence everywhere and have lead the Black Lives Matter movement to rise in the United States and the world. These photographs capture the moment that Yessenia Fernández Selier, Cynthia Renta and myself perform and broadcast on Facebook our BLACK LIVES MATTER: Healing rituals for souls lost to violence. The performance that lasted examines the need to reconnect the search for justice with African and Native American spiritual practices that unlock ancestral technologies and knowledge that can offer healing and empowerment to black and brown bodies.

 

Artists Names: Natalie Marx

Yesenia Fernández Selier 

Cynthia Renta 

Images by: Natalie Marx

BLACK LIVES MATTER: Healing rituals for souls lost to violence 

Date of performance: June 6, 2020 

Location: James J. Braddock Park, West New York, NJ.

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We were getting used to living in the pandemic when George Floyd was killed by a police officer on camera, calling his ‘mama’, he exhaled his last words. The world woke up knocking down statues, taking to the streets, pushing against violence, against indifference, against impunity. Our collective was in the midst of a fundraising to alleviate the impact of Covid-19 on Afro-indigenous communities in Latin America. We took to the streets with both wishes: to alleviate and commemorate. We were preparing for the demonstration leading us to the Black Lives Matter March in North Bergen when we heard about Breonna Taylor's death. So we decided to heal, enlighten, unite. We held a public mass, for George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, of all people, open, on earth, under the sun. A multicolored circle of demonstrators in transit thatjoined the performance, sang in unison to uplift their souls, and to raise their spirits with our love. This act of purification, of farewell, of our Colombian, Puerto Rican, Cuban grandmothers, was our offering to acknowledge the transition of those black, brown and indigenous bodies whose lives were violently taken to arrive to an ancestral space too soon. Ibae, Ibae Ntonu, Breonna Taylor; Ibae, Ibae Ntonu George Floyd Rest in peace. By the summer of 2020, the problem of violence against black bodies in the US and the rest of the world had reached a tipping point during the lockdown. This performance was a response to the urgency of the times and a global health crisis that continues. We are three Caribbean artists (Colombia, Cuba, Puerto Rico) based in New Jersey, currently calling ourselves The Coven. Our work meets at the intersection of our studies and practice around the Afican and Indigenous diaspora: performance art, dance and ritual.

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On view at https://www.marginalartprojects.com/hindsight 

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