Initiation Rite, Sacred Bath: Rito de inciación, Baño sagrado

Description:

While in residence at Western Front, María Magdalena Campos-Pons developed one of her first video works, Initiation Rite, Sacred Bath: Rito de inciación, Baño sagrado. 

The work is a visual poem that reflects on identity, race and ethnicity through an interpretation of Santeria and Yoruba rituals. Over the course of the thirty-minute video, Campos-Pons enacts cleansing rituals using water, milk and blood, which symbolize sexuality, pleasure, and nourishment. 

This was also one of Campos-Pons’s first collaborations with the experimental musician and composer Neil Leonard, who also appears in the video work. Throughout the video, the pair draw lines with blood from their fingers and walk a spiral pattern in bare feet. These rituals represent the artist’s reflections on the perception of her establishing an interracial marriage with Leonard, as well as her process of immigrating to the United States. 

Leonard’s soundtrack is comprised of abstract electronic sound, percussive grooves, a Cuban chant played on violin, and improvisations on a Mexican clay flute and Indian cowbell, with Campos-Pons’s intermittent voice, reading quotes in both Spanish and English.

Video documentation is available upon request.