burn the settler, sink his ship

This piece is a collection of remnants from a performance where I took an iconographic painting of Christopher Columbus and burned the faces of colonizers in the painting with hot glass. These three iterations - video, physical remnant, and zine - parallel each other in the ways they represent the action of burning a colonizer. One can take a paper boat and unfold - thus destroying a colonizer's ship - and opening it to reveal a zine with instructions for the decolonizing ritual I perform. In the act, I first make a tortilla by hand and slap it on Columbus's face, as to show that this gastronomical craft exists in spite of settler colonial violence, here to punch a colonizer in the face with 500 years of intergenerational trauma.

2018