infill 2025
Foreign & Domestic, New York
performance in Maite Iribarren Vazquez and Karla Zurita’s Amenities
I was invited by a friend to perform in her exhibition responding to the Leaning Tower of New York, an abandoned skyscraper project in lower manhattan. Its tilt was caused by improper construction atop unstable ground composed of colonial era infill, one of the projects of the dutch in the 1600s to expand the buildable land of what is now called manhattan. They took gravel, dirt, chunks of shipwrecks and docks and shoved them into the marshy ground. I descend from a shipwreck such as this, my ancestors arriving on the shipwreck of the Angel Gabriel in 1635. I was struck by the literal rendering of this instability we know- produced by the wreckage of the colonial arrival- an unstable ground. I thought about descent and the reported phenomenon of losing sense of subject and object with the loss of a stable horizon line, I wondered what form that legacy of instability can take within the body now and I kept returning to the churning in my chest like a shipwreck shoved into the ground.
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