Our Intimates
Sullivan SITE Galleries, Chicago, IL. March 11, 2019.
In its first public performance, 53 HRS (ongoing) was a single iteration of an accumulative collection of times spent standing upon a constructed corn husk plinth. Testing the limits of pain tolerance, self reflection and meditation, and an attempt at embodied comparative sacrifice, each iteration of committed standings was an endurance investigation. This performance lasted a total of 22 minutes, 15 seconds. In the project’s completion, Ramirez will have stood for a total of 53 hours.
The proposed time of 53 hours was in direct response to an algorithmic understanding of the amount of time it *should have taken an anonymous immigrant to travel on foot from their estimated border crossing site to asylum in the United States.
*This immigrant never reached their destination, having died about 4 hours into their journey.
53 HRS is an attempt at an empathetic completion of this immigrant’s journey.
