Ecologías Solidarias

Multimedia performance and installation at the RISD Museum, 2025

In Ecologías Solidarias, artists Asma Kazmi and Anabel Vázquez Rodríguez reunite to reimagine a performance they first created twenty years earlier. Joined by their longtime colleague Katherine Toukhy, the artists bring their individual histories into a shared exploration of bodies, materials, memory, and place. The work considers how relationships endure and change across time, and how collaboration can become a method of excavation, witnessing, and repair.

The performance unfolds across two interconnected sites. On the floor, the artists chisel, break apart, and excavate architectural detritus to release personal relics embedded within it. The strenuous action exposes the histories held inside built environments and makes visible the physical labor required to recover what has been buried, displaced, or forgotten.

At an alchemy table, the recovered fragments undergo a different process. Through gold-leaf gilding, mending, and purification rituals, damaged materials are carefully transformed without concealing their fractures. Gold does not restore the objects to an imagined original state. Instead, it illuminates the places where they have been broken and rejoined, allowing rupture to remain part of their history.

Set against the material and symbolic ruins produced by imperialism and settler colonialism, these acts of excavation and repair resist the idea that damage can simply be erased. Ecologías Solidarias approaches healing as a collective and unfinished practice. Through bodily effort, ritual, and sustained collaboration, the artists express a shared desire to mend and reconstruct damaged landscapes while honoring the memories, relationships, and contradictions they contain.

Performance with Anabel Vázquez Rodríguez, Boston, 2005