Wrapping Atacama

April 16, 2016

Artlington Studios, Winnipeg Manitoba

Wrapping and packing the vibrant forms is a necessary labour. It is also a precarious labour, that demands physical and affective care. A labour of release.

It is difficult to send the sculptures ahead of us, not knowing if they will arrive intact or if they will be detained at customs. We don’t know if we will see them again. The perilousness of their journey perhaps weighs most heavily on Monica who has spent years gestating, creating and living with these intricately textured ceramic forms. How do we honour the gravity of her gesture of release? What capacities must we draw upon in ourselves to share in bearing of the weight of letting them go?

With this intimate participatory performance, CONSTELACIONES reaches out to family, friends and allies from our Winnipeg communities with an invitation to share the weight of the necessarily careful labour of wrapping the fragile forms. As part of this task-based performance event, we invite our intimates to join us in an embodied meditation on what it means to deeply trust and release something you care about. What it means to gather around those who have experienced the trauma of displacement, separation, and perilous journeys. What collective labours—physical tasks, political resistance, healing—do these displacements demand of us? These are some of the questions we ponder in the hours we spend wrapping and packing, sharing stories, songs and gestures of release.