Fracture|Ritual

Fracture|Ritual is a large-scale, durational performance and installation rooted in the United States that examines the embodied conditions of democracy at a moment of acute national strain. Developed across multiple U.S. sites, the project responds to escalating climate disasters, democratic erosion, racialized state violence, and the normalization of authoritarian rhetoric. It investigates how these structural pressures register in the body—through exhaustion, hyper-vigilance, grief, fragmentation, and collective numbness.

Rather than approaching democracy as a purely legislative or electoral system, Fracture/Ritual reframes it as a somatic and relational practice. The work asks how American democracy has historically depended upon the exclusion, containment, and exploitation of Black, Indigenous, queer, disabled, and immigrant bodies while simultaneously demanding their belief in its promise. It considers how surveillance infrastructures, algorithmic governance, and digital economies now choreograph attention, proximity, and dissent, subtly shaping how citizens gather, move, and imagine one another.

Through durational ritual actions, ecological materials such as salt, soil, water, and breath, and live civic assemblies structured as performance scores, the project proposes democracy as a bodily discipline that must be rehearsed. Slowness counters the speed of outrage cycles. Collective listening counters polarization. Refusal interrupts extractive participation. Care becomes infrastructure. In this national context, the work asks: What does democracy feel like in the nervous system? What forms of embodied participation might resist domination rather than replicate it? How can ritual function not as nostalgia, but as civic recalibration?