Earthworks is a collaboration by multidisciplinary artists Cristina Bartley Dominguez and Catherine Chen, who explore rites, ritual spaces, and ancestral knowledge. Through their incorporated practice of image-making, movement, sound, text, and installation, they create performance-based works that address the natures of catastrophe and mythology, belonging and inheritance. By bridging their Mexican and Taiwanese ancestries, they integrate folklore, somatic ritual, and pre-colonial modes of storytelling to unearth the relationship between memory, movement, and land, imagining survival strategies that will aid all forms of life in our intimate, yet catastrophic worlds.
Earthworks actively participates in the slow history of reshaping the land, a process that provides sanctuary to those who encounter it. In decentering humanism, they excavate for the ancestral languages which tell the fragmented narratives of deforestation, industrialization, and struggle. Earthworks’s practice is rooted, on many levels, in the overlaps between rituals of play and grief. As they build a more direct collaboration with the land, they create and identify movement scores learned from their environmental surroundings.
