What I thought I would do today is show you a couple of clips from performances and some slides, to give you a sense of two trajectories that I've explored in performance work. And then we can go up to the gallery and look at Magdalena's video installation. I was actually up there earlier today making notes to try to figure out what would be a good bridge. Just to getting you thinking in that way, in a comparative way, I think that both Magdalena and I are interested in ritual as a form of interface, of pre-technological interface, because rituals are, in a way, interactive with objects and people, and through those interactions, people define themselves and their sense of place. A focus of some of the work I'll show you today of mine has been more involved with public rituals, with institutionalized rituals, with state rituals, with disciplinary rituals, and Magda's work, in this particular piece, Spoken Softly with Mama, is focusing on private rituals and family rituals. But nonetheless we're interested in how those interactions generate, for individuals, a sense of place.  

©1999 The Museum of Modern Art, New York