The video piece, Agua de Vida, documents the enactment of an intuitive expression of water worship made at Jamaica Bay and contemplates water and land as the most basic components of a human body. Without water, the body is dust, and with water, the body is alive. The conditions of bodies of water on Earth are interconnected with the conditions of human bodies on our sacred planet.
Before settler colonialism, the area surrounding Jamaica Bay held indigenous villages of Canarsie and Rockaway peoples, and the bay provided an excellent source of food and transport. Today, it is a holy place where pujas are performed by many Indo-Carribean Hindu worshipers that compare the bay to the sacred Ganges River in India.
My intention with creating, Agua de Vida, is to uplift the sacredness of water in the midst of worldwide human impact that has been detrimental to its stability and life-giving force. Irreverence for water and life, is causing a global crisis that has devastated the lives of people, land and water- with marginalized bodies receiving first impacts and being most affected.
