Artist residency project proposal
I am currently seeking an artist’s residency to support a project existing at the intersection of cultural studies and performance art. Set specifically in the South of France where one half of my family draws lineage, the project investigates pre-industrial ways of being together in shared ritual, and specifically the use of costumes, plant medicine, and shared meals. Reclaiming the feminine genius of world-building, the project examines, honors, and follows the instruction of my elders and ancestors with a contemporary sensibility.
The ultimate, tangible outcome is a shared performance, experience, or celebration informed by site-specific research and a collaborative ethic. This may be a shared meal, costumed ritual, masquerade ball, or all of the above. Participants will include a residency cohort, residency staff, and local community members.
The proposed project exists in three phases…
The project requires my physical body to be in and feel into the site-specific space and history. Approaching research with an immersive, sensory approach, I will meet with elders and makers, keep records of conversations and findings, learn about local plants and wildlife by being with them, and prototype ritual objects as I digest and synthesize information.
Phase one: Research regional pre-industrial community celebrations with a focus on shared meals and ritual adornment.
Phase two: Design and create ritual objects, wear, foods and libations in preparation for phase three.
Phase three: Immersive celebration and experiential history lesson based on research evidence established in phase one and using bespoke wares and regional cuisine from phase two.
The work is personal…
Above: Dinner with Paulette and Aime Soulier, Winters, CA. Below: Costuming and celebrating with cousins, Winters, CA.
The project reflects my early intrigue with gathering. The way time stops when we get together and fill the trees with laughter on a summer night. The way each bite ties us to our ancestors who shared these foods, allows us to take their stories into our flesh, absorb them. To absorb their story is to make our story. Our gathering adds a chapter, one we write together.
My desire to create shared experiences that cultivate a sense of belonging and togetherness stems from my lineage. My mother’s side of the family is Ashkenazi Jewish, where the opportunity to use food and ritual as symbolic metaphor is endless. From the seder plate and interpretation of the haggadah at Passover to the oily latkes and lessons they teach about miracles in the dark of winter. But that’s just half of it. My father’s family is from the South of France, where I seek to be in residence.
When my father was a young man working as a farm-hand in the agricultural fields of the Central Valley, he was introduced to Paulette & Aime Soulier, ranch caretakers originally from Provence, France. The couple became like parents to him, and a few other French guys who found themselves far away from home. These men became their sons, and when the couple retired in the hills outside of Winters, CA, their chosen family followed. I had the pleasure and privilege of growing up close to my father’s culture through these grandparents. Their home was the center of our community, on top of a hill dotted with cypress and olive trees. They would host large parties for Quatorze Juillet and Christmas, gatherings that held our community together. Paulette actually had a cooking show on PBS in the 80s, and helping her make a bouillabaisse at age 9 or 10 was when I first realized food could be art, that it could transform into magic. She was beyond words, one of my greatest teachers, and absolutely my best friend. Hear her remarkable story and sing-song Provençal accent here.
On Experiential Learning…
Bill Holm, Professor Emeritus of Art History, and Curator Emeritus of Northwest Coast Indian Art at the Burke Museum in Seattle, WA
Location-specific rituals allow us to time travel and connect with the land and our ancestors. They are embodied history lessons. The project reflects on and allows me to exercise my passion for experiential education facilitation, and how useful it is to feel into what we learn and not just read about it. To share in this learning is to change on a cellular level together.
My work as an experiential-learning facilitator goes back to the summers of 2008-2009 when I assisted Bill and Marty Holm in facilitating an educational program for young people at Camp Nor’wester in Washington State. Bill Holm is recognized internationally as one of the most knowledgeable experts in the field of Northwest Coast Native Art History in his long career as an artist, professor, and curator of the Burke Museum at the University of Washington. Bill and Marty met at Camp Nor’wester in the 1930s, and through their life and work nourished lifelong friendships with Kwakwaka'wakw community leaders and their families who sent their children to and also generously shared their culture with camp, and utilized the camp as a practice space for re-instituting masked rituals after the Potlatch Ban was lifted in 1951. The decades-long relationship and cultural exchange between the Holm’s and the Hunt family, a prominent, multi-generational family of Kwakwaka'wakw artists, carvers, and knowledge keepers, known for their contributions to the preservation and continuation of traditional art and culture, resulted in experiential curriculum for young people, both native and non-native, to learn about the art indigenous to the land they inhabit. As their assistant, I was able to both witness and participate in the power of their legacy as a record keeper and assistant education facilitator.
ON Transformational costume magic…
Krewe of Chakra Kahn, Mardi Gras Day 2019, New Orleans, Louisiana. That’s me on the right in indigo as the third eye. :)
Then, I found ritual costuming for myself.
In 2014 I followed some friends back to New Orleans who hadn’t lived in the city since Hurricane Katrina. These very talented friends, well versed in building masks, headpieces, elaborate dress, and changing themselves into other beings, taught me how to costume, how to Mardi Gras. Mardi Gras, in this sense, is a verb. The long lineage of Mardi Gras can’t be encapsulated here by any means. It is more than a day or season of celebration. It is more than just one thing. It is an entire universe woven through costume, songs kept and shared from the bodies of revelers, and food shared with neighbors in the street. The city simultaneously shuts down and bursts open. There is no business as usual. Together, on what is a regular Tuesday anywhere else, we make another world, from our other selves. A friend wisely summarized this when they said, “New Orleans celebrates itself by celebrating everyone. At Mardi Gras, what is not healed is revealed.”
Costuming can be magic. In ritual costuming, we don’t become someone else, we pull parts of ourselves forward that are otherwise hidden in the shadows of our consciousness, jump time, and affirm our existence in multiple realms at once. Doing this together, we can see even more of ourselves in each other. To costume together is to enter the multiverse of collective being.
The project is the synthesis of all of these interests and parts of myself, it ties these threads together into something whole and tangible. It allows me to dive deeper, learn more, and share. It also allows me to claim and define what it means to be an artist in 2025 in a way that feels aligned with my sensibility being in a curious, feeling, sensuous body oriented more to process than outcome. There is no singular genius or object/observer relationship in this project. It’s about building a world to make magic in, heal through, and celebrate together. The project is of and about its subject matter: us.