Hello,

My name is NiFe, and if you are reading this, you may have seen me walking and listening. I am a multidisciplinary artist focusing on both internal and external landscapes.

“Hear” is a durational performance that occurs each Sunday from sunrise to sunset on a new patch of land. The first performance took place on June 9th, 2024, in East Cambridge, MA.

This work explores what it means to be present for the spirit, ecology, and history of a place. Through deep listening, I seek to learn from the soil, biome, and human resonance of each specific locale. Every corner of the earth holds memory in its silt and bark; through embodied listening, a sensitivity can open, allowing us to hear what the land has to share. This practice is rooted in recognition and reparation as an enactment. The central question is: What happens when we bear witness, listen completely, and stay present? What can be learned, and how can it contribute to a broader conversation in a time when many are displaced, both from internal and external landscapes?

Durational performance art involves acts of endurance, often dealing with time nonlinearly and focusing on bodily actions. The labor is where the work comes alive, enabling transformation. In “Hear,” for approximately 15 hours, I fast and walk in steady motion in a circle on soil, grass, and weeds. The act of labor opens the door for the work to unfold, blurring the lines between living and art.

The selected locations are patches of earth that are either undisturbed by development or have reemerged after development has been removed. These are places where the skin of the soil is visible, allowing direct contact. With close connection, intimacy can be cultivated, and the vulnerability of a bare surface can be heard.

The clothes I wear are made from old bedsheets, garments we wear nightly as we contact the beyond in our dreams. The color white is chosen for its varied cross-cultural meanings: peace, mourning, death, expansiveness, and the color of all colors combined. The design is a syncretic mix of my cultural background, contemporary and vintage fashion, and long-standing spiritual practices, following the tradition of distinct costumes for specific rituals.

By walking in a single circular line for an extended period, an impression is made, and the earth’s surface is opened. Through the shedding of layers, we are drawn closer. Seeds of native plants are left in the circle’s hollow as an ephemeral memory.

The walking occurs during the exact window of daylight because this is an embodied awake dream, right here.