Very Hot, Very Sweet, 2021

3 hour performance, presented at Performance Is Alive Satellite Art Show in Miami Beach, FL, November 2021

Materials: 12lb of Domino (TM) Pure Cane Sugar, 12 Galvanized Steel Buckets, One Mop Tub, One Off-Brand Recliner, Two Weeks of White Clothes, Cotton Clothesline, Boiling Water.

In the morning, after washing my clothes, my mother would kneel beside the bathtub to wash her hair. I would watch.

At night, my wet hair stains my pillows and leaves rashes on the back of my neck. Scrubbing, my skin becomes angry instead of clean. I am denatured, the boundary between body and environment is heated and made raw. 

“To live is to leave traces.” Attempting absolute cleanliness, I recede into placelessness, subservience, self-obliteration. I am intimate with my surroundings, but that intimacy destroys me. The space is saturated with polarities – anonymity and intimacy, presence and absence, soft power and submission. We breathe in the cloying steam. An airing of dirty laundry presented with open palms. An obsessive maternal instinct, unearthed and positioned. I am small, and the dirt my body makes is yours, hot and sweet. Does it please you?