photos by Suzy Poling

Ritual Viriditas

Solo show at Coaxial 2021

“Viriditas” is a term used by mystic healer, Hildegard of Bingen, as the self-regenerating power in plants analogous to the intrinsic healing power of human beings to renew their own future. Looking at intra-active embodiments through daily plant ritual, Paige Emery’s solo show and performance, Ritual Viriditas, explores the extension of encounters into shaping relational, communicative forms. The current spatiotemporal landscape of proliferating technology, increasing isolation, continuing pandemic and all its fallout amidst a climate crisis is urgently fertile ground for reconstructing interactions.  When questioning which practices towards ecologically-minded, collective care are sustainable,  an important consideration is that we are creatures of habit. Ritual praxis can have a neurological reprogramming effect on the habitual psyche, a conduit which can reterritorialize individualistic norms through receptiveness and response to a valued enmeshment with others, nonhumans, or object-beings. Through installation and performance, Ritual Viriditas establishes catalytic channels through a cartography of the ecological body.

There is a bidirectional influence between posture and feeling of affection - feeling of affection draws posture to lean, meanwhile leaning arouses affection. Affectionate posture permeates within ritual - offering embodied awareness and value to that which is ritualized, and in return, an altered receptivity feeds into the day-to-day. Ritual Viriditas proposes creating alternate pathways towards knowing by leaning into our interactions with othered beings, altering the threads woven through intersubjectivity. It is a pursuit of stretching inscribed enchantment towards meeting places of abjection. Malleable implementations within ritual can reconfigure the space of abjection as an ambivalent one - taking the point at “the thin line to the body and society”(Julia Kristeva) where boundaries are distinguished between self and other, and uprooting it as the point where othered relations can be transmuted. Ritual Viriditas is an exploration of how such spaces can be fabricated with ritualistic modalities of awareness, care, and softening of barriers as praxis towards renewing eco-social relations. 

Paige will perform the daily ritual she commits to in her garden every morning, with an altar of symbiotic plants from her garden mounted onto PPE barrier shields. Accompanied by leaning figures dancing at the gateways of the space, she will be embodying a habitual praxis of deepening awareness and value within plant relations, followed by a writing stream of ecopoetics on the wall - a process which will accumulate to alternative ways of thinking relationality expressed through a live streamed performance on May 29th.