The Earth Under Our Feet

This video and performance is a response to questions of belonging. It is reflective of my own journey in this world and my search for a personal sense of place, a home. The wellspring of my essence is rooted in situation. And I firmly believe that if we feel we belong to a place, we must recognize that it also belongs and belonged to others. I see my performance video as a poetic intervention exploring questions of collective identities, materiality, fragility, and impermanence. By juxtaposing my own brown body with the brown clay body, I urge viewers to notice our entangled and our ethical connection to the ground we stand on. The text is intended to be a mantra, a prayer, a meditation on belonging as a spiritual quest. The performance makes reference to the traditional symbolism of feet in Indian iconography and it acknowledges the earliest hominid footprints in Laetoli. The process is inspired by South Asian practices of foot-wedging clay and by my own background in dance. I’ve borrowed the title from the notebooks of George Oppen, an American Objectivist poet, and a political activist, who wrote, “The earth under our feet; we are not asked to begin nowhere.”

Images: Ashwini Bhat