Rituals & Land · Java and Bali

This field practice developed through extended stays in Java and Bali, Indonesia, as part of a longer-term intention to walk across multiple islands. The work emerged through participation in and attentive listening within local rituals, where ceremonial practices reveal deeply embedded relationships between people, land, ancestors, and non-human forces.

Through funerals, forest rituals, and full-moon ceremonies, the practice encountered a worldview in which humans are not positioned as extractive agents, but as participants within reciprocal systems. Many rituals emphasize offering, repayment, and care—acts understood as returning what has been taken from the land. This principle of reciprocity resonates strongly with ritual practices observed among the Naxi communities in Yunnan, China, particularly their sky-offering ceremonies, where giving back to nature is central to sustaining balance.

Rather than documenting ritual as spectacle, this practice focuses on listening to how sound, gesture, movement, and silence organize communal life and ecological responsibility. Field recordings and visual documentation attend to the ways ritual sound mediates relationships between human presence, ancestral memory, and environmental continuity. Through this work, ritual is understood not as tradition alone, but as living ecological knowledge—offering practical wisdom for coexistence within changing environments.