Weihui Lu and Sarah Crofts | Proposal for Rhapsody Tentacular, 2024 

TO ASHES (A GROUNDING / A HAUNTING / A DREAMING)

Make sets of paper from joss paper and natural materials

Invite viewers to write personal messages on the paper

Burn the paper at liminal sites outdoors

Use the ash for intuitive drawings

Description

The project to Ashes will take place across three stages: first, as an interactive installation, where viewers are invited to write down personal messages to the land, those who have passed, or past/future selves, on handmade paper. The paper will then be burned at various sites in Red Hook, Brooklyn, where nature borders and reclaims the constructed landscape. In stage three, a recording of the burning will occur in the presentation space, while the artists and/or performers use the resultant ashes to create intuitive drawings within the space itself.

Notes on to Ashes

This project references the traditional Chinese mourning ritual of burning joss paper for the dead, and the communicative and transformative ritual belief in the process of burning. Rather than reproducing the traditional trappings of the process, we are interested in the poetic and secular gesture of attempting to pass on messages to the intangible, and the desire for a collective releasing of grief. The cyclical, interactive format of the process speaks to the non linearity of healing, and the hope that empathetic community can offer mourners some relief.

INSTRUCTIONS:

Choose a question that speaks to you. Write your response, then fold up the paper and place it in the metal bowl.

1). Which land—under concrete, below your feet, here, or miles away—would you like to speak to? What would you like to say?

(A GROUNDING)

2). Who, or what, have you been carrying with you for too long? What would you like to tell them, as you release them?

(A HAUNTING)

3). Think of a moment in your past, or anticipated future. What message would you like to share with this self?

(A DREAMING)

Sarah Crofts is a multi-disciplinary artist working with time-based processes to examine power dynamics embedded in physical and social landscapes. These concerns grew from her childhood in North Adams, Massachusetts, a town which endured two significant redevelopment projects whose impact echoes through multiple generations, having displaced elder members of Crofts’ family, it now informs her critique of real estate development in her home of Red Hook, Brooklyn. 

Weihui Lu is a Queens-based artist, educator and curator. Through installation, printmaking and performance, her practice explores the immigrant experience through personal narrative, as well as the broader environmental and psychological implications of the modern landscape. Her work has been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Transborder Art, and Trestle Gallery, among others, and she has been awarded residencies at Santa Fe Art Institute, Byrdcliffe, Chashama North, and Arteles Creative Center. Lu holds a B.A. from Barnard College, Columbia University.