Light of Ours
Los Angeles, CA
The Covid-19 pandemic has created a mess of the home space. As we struggle to maintain our mental, emotional, and physical fortitude, we find ourselves negotiating blurred lines attempting to separate study, leisure, and spiritual space. While the weight of exhaustive everyday life remains rested on our shoulders, the obscured boundaries of virtual and physical realms are situated in the ritual practices of everyday life. We still make coffee, light candles, gather, and find new methods of study together. Consequently, we find ourselves breaking walls of traditional accompaniment, puncturing swirling patterns of exhaustion to design a future that flows with the continual state of social flux.
Light of Ours works with an archive of conjure to heighten the “ritual experiences which express our need to connect the past and the ephemeral”. Moreover this performance attunes itself to the echoes of loss during pandemic, recognizing the grief that spills in/out/through our homes and virtual screens. Having gathered 735 candles through community donation, Light of Ours theorizes accompaniment as it endeavors to connect the artist to the spect-actor in an effort to rework the forces which keep riotous life at bay. Having taken place on the threshold of the 2021 New Year, Light of Ours asks, what method of study might we conjure when we accompany each other in grief? How might an acknowledgement of the dead create an entry point to embracing blackness as porousness; that is, an invitation to open and absorb mourning as an active agent for reinvention.
