"A Shared Tradition to Sustain the Land"

Most indigenous cultures have grown over millennia of human experience from the land where they are rooted. For this project my collaborator Andreína Maldonado, a Venezuelan performing artist and cultural worker, and I explored the parallel beliefs across both of our ancestral traditions with respect to sustaining the lands that nourished our forebears. The practices of the Jewish tradition of Shmita bear a striking resemblance to South American indigenous practices of protecting the land and allowing it to rest. Andreína created her costume to reflect Venezuelan indigenous attire, and we sought locations near our San Francisco homes that were evocative of Venezuela’s Orinoco River Basin. To express the spiritual duality of our peoples’ permanent connectedness to the land vs. the ephemeral nature of all living beings, I captured these images using both standard (visible light) photography and infrared light photography. The infrared images, made using a specially converted camera, render the foliage as a stark, shocking white while expressing skin tones and other natural elements in an almost ghostly, ethereal manner.