The Gold Series

The Gold Series is a three part series made up of three durational performances that took place between 2014 & 2017:

• The Gold Series: Burrinja Chapter (Melbourne, Australia, 2014)
• The Gold Series: Madrid Chapter (Madrid, Spain, 2016)
• Honoring the Treaties (New York, 2017)

All three of these performances are walks where, for four hours, I walked together with a collaborator from a cultural background that has been known to have undergone serious trauma or distress. For the duration of the piece, my collaborators walked backwards for the four hours, while I covered their partially naked bodies in gold.

The gold foil takes its inspiration from Kintsugi, an ancient Japanese practice and philosophy where broken ceramic vessels were pieced back together using lacquer and gold. Once mended, these vessels show their golden cracks without any shame, as a silent homage to their troubled history and the inexorable passing of time. In the same way, through The Gold Series, I aim to highlight the beauty that exists within cultural, social and political conflicts and taboos present in different contexts around the world.

The Gold Series: Burrinja Chapter, took place in Australia. For this iteration, I collaborated with an Indigenous Australian artist as a comment on the brutal history Indigenous Australians have gone through (and continue to go through) since they were colonized.

For The Gold Series: Madrid Chapter, I collaborated with a young Syrian refugee, who emigrated to Spain from the city of Aleppo. This work responded to the refugee crisis taking place not only in Europe, but throughout the world, and that in 2016 reached a critical point.

For 'Honoring the Treaties', the latest installment in 'The Gold Series', I collaborated with a Native American artist. For this installment, which touched on the mistreatment and all the treaties broken by the US Government in order to favor it over Native American communities, we walked over what once was the original trading trail of the Lenape Indians of Manhattan. The first trail to cross the island from South to North, which has now been converted at parts into Broadway, and in other parts into Bowery.