Dry Spell
Dry Spell is a ceremony for a watershed in drought. Held beneath an underpass along Julian Wash, this site-specific piece was performed in winter 2025. Through sound, video, and the presence of those witnessing, the wash was ephemerally refilled. Its installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson is a second iteration of the work, which includes documentation of the site-specific performance and a cassette tape recording of the audio that deteriorates over the course of the exhibit as it passes over sandpaper.
Julian Wash was once a thriving watershed that flowed into the Santa Cruz river in what is now called Tucson for thousands of years. Indigenous people lived with this water, cultivating homes and food along its corridor over many generations. Now it is increasingly a dry and forgotten place, an image of existential and literal drought.
This piece was created to be performed alongside video projections and with a group of people as witness, all together embodying the water that once was within the wash; a ceremony for the ghost of a watershed.
How can an interstitial space become an embodied or full one? The inevitability of drought and the death of essential passages of water is already upon us in the Sonoran Desert. Rather than exclusively grieve their death, we are interested in how grief can be transmuted into other forms, envisioning and calling forth qualities that have been lost to evoke their metaphysical presence. It is in “abandoned” spaces, out of sight and deemed functionless to government and economy where new forms may be played with and begin to flourish.