…until now
with collective anestuary
"...until now" is a site-responsive performance ritual by Bay Area-based Filipinx American Kimberley Acebo Arteche that pays homage to the shapeshifting survival strategies of communities who grapple with how much of their intersecting identities can wholly appear in different spaces. Arteche's performance, with accompanying soundscape by composer Joshua Icban and multi-instrumentalist transcriptions001, prompts witnesses to consider: How much queerness, how much brownness, how much culture, and how much divinity can we fit within the white walls of a gallery space in San Francisco, a city being engulfed by gentrification? Inspired by Carlos Villa's reclamation of ritual practices, Arteche makes an offering for healing to invoke our wholeness in these spaces and to wrestle with the discomfort that comes with being and becoming visible.
This performance was commissioned by Filipinx curator and scholar Thea Quiray Tagle for the exhibition "Carlos Villa: Roots and Reinvention" at the SFAC Galleries, She envisioned a series of site-specific performances made in the spirit of Villa's 1980 performance of Ritual at The Garm, a now-defunct cooperative arts space and educational center in the Mission District, which was located beneath the now-demolished 101 freeway interchange on Army Street (renamed to Cesar Chavez Blvd). Villa's intense performance was a ritual of decolonization and a reclamation of the Filipino body and history, in a city undergoing massive transformation. In this present moment of crisis and possibility, it is time for new rituals to be activated and more space to be reclaimed!