Inclinate (2018)

One-channel, color, sound, duration, loop.

Inclinate, 2018, is a site-specific durational performance investigating an act of servitude. I bow repeatedly in the nude between two large stones at a quarry in the woods of Vermont, performing one of the four gestures I enacted during my time in Tania Bruguera’s Untitled(Havana, 2000) at MoMA in 2018. Following the MoMA performance, I was interrogated at the Ministry of Immigration and Foreigners in Cuba after participating in the first alternative biannual, 00Biennal de La Habana. This performance of repetition stages an act of reform, regulation, and discipline as a response to interrogations, threats, and surveillance.

This piece is part of Pájaro Falling, a series of site-specific performances navigating my entanglements with contact, conflict, and violence. I use a transparent plastic tarp, my own blood, the nude body, a militant uniform, a fence, and movement to engage and recycle ideas of visibility, death, and traps. Investigating Jose Esteban Muñoz’s theory of “disidentification,” that positions queer world making on, with, and against dominant ideology, I disidentify with the militant and the conditions of being queer and Cuban. Contending what and who has the implied right to camouflage and concealment to disarticulate colonial discourses of authority. As I fail and fall within Cubanidad, these performances point to the intersection of my identity and the violence that results from misalignment with the cultural and ideological mainstream.