What if humanity lived in constant awareness of sacredness? How would we treat our bodies, each other, the land and water? My current work contemplates the sacred among the urban environment in two works, The Urban Environment and The Sacred: Water Ritual, and Water Is Our Bodies, Our Bodies Are Water.
This installment of Works on Water’s three year triennial turns to concepts of long-term care for our urban waterfront ecology and reconsideration of water time-scales. WoWhaus Resident artists’ and Tending the Edge artists’ projects call attention to marginalized ecological community members, and to water’s cycles of time and being.
in collaboration with Angela Miskis + Sadhana: Coalition of Progressive Hindus and United Madrassi Association Inc.
Artist Elizabeth Velazquez reconnects with ancestral knowledge, and extracting, excavating, and reclaiming that history from her body through the act of ritual. Water Ritual: Tending the Edge at Jamaica Bay is a collaborative piece where a water ritual is merged with a cleaning ritual. Through performance, Velazquez and Angela Miskis come together to activate the water’s edge and reflect on the need for a cleaner and safer waterfront that is both revered and respected. Angela's performance expands on her current work, Abuela Neighborhood Maintenance (ANM), which combines her family history, commitment to social service, and sustainability in stewardship projects across Queens. The project Sacred Waters: Jamaica Bay gains inspiration from the NYC Comprehensive Waterfront Plan (CWP) and is made in collaboration with Sadhana: Coalition of Progressive Hindus and United Madrassi Association Inc., existing cultural organizations dedicated to protecting Jamaica Bay. One goal stated in the CWP, is to promote the "stewardship of public spaces on the waterfront.” Stewardship is one concept that guides the work Sacred Waters: Jamaica Bay, as well as connecting and interacting with the natural environment.
The video piece, Agua de Vida, documents the enactment of an intuitive expression of water worship made at Jamaica Bay and contemplates water and land as the most basic components of a human body. Without water, the body is dust, and with water, the body is alive. The conditions of bodies of water on Earth are interconnected with the conditions of human bodies on our sacred planet.
Before settler colonialism, the area surrounding Jamaica Bay held indigenous villages of Canarsie and Rockaway peoples, and the bay provided an excellent source of food and transport. Today, it is a holy place where pujas are performed by many Indo-Carribean Hindu worshipers that compare the bay to the sacred Ganges River in India.
My intention with creating, Agua de Vida, is to uplift the sacredness of water in the midst of worldwide human impact that has been detrimental to its stability and life-giving force. Irreverence for water and life, is causing a global crisis that has devastated the lives of people, land and water- with marginalized bodies receiving first impacts and being most affected.
