Salt Archives: Sweep in Front of Your Own Porch is a ritual-based performance that gathers family memory as material, treating salt as both preservative and portal. Salt becomes a material language of protection and rupture, where when the “glass breaks”, a new beginning enters. The work considers ritual as a technology of survival and protection, where religion and spirituality coexist as tools rather than oppositions. It is a representation of the tools that Tanniqua-Kay’s family quietly whispers to her in conversation, a continued thread and representation of duality. The work considers how Black life moves in cycles of rupture, protection, volcanism, erosion, and cultivation of the land. It investigates the terror/fear and intimacy of immersion, drowning and resurfacing as embodied archives that refuse erasure. It navigates the space between religion and spirituality, honoring practices such as salting a home, grinding remedies as technologies of survival rather than superstition. The performance asks when transmission occurs and who gets to carry it forward in re-voicing ancestral memories. Ultimately, the act of sweeping becomes a gesture of accountability and care: tending one’s own “front porch” before crossing into inheritance.
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