Tree
Tree/ Tree.ceo is the performance art and design project of Ana Vásquez, in which she appropriates the means of performance marketing to co-create regenerative loops and funnels that supplant cultural erasure.
Tree/ Tree.ceo is the performance art and design project of Ana Vásquez, in which she appropriates the means of performance marketing to co-create regenerative loops and funnels that supplant cultural erasure. Informed by her practice as an Emergent Strategy facilitator, new media artist, and brand designer, her Dominican history serves as a starting point for stoking Pre-Columbian collective memory. Employing soft power to explore intersectional myth-making and tool-building for lush ecosystems.
Oyster
Jennae is a music/performance artist and Babaylanic student.
Jennae Santos (she/they) is a queer Filipinx music and performance artist and Babaylanic student born in the Bay Area (Ohlone territory) and based in Brooklyn (Lenape territory), with ancestral roots across the Philippines archipelago. She explores the performance of embodied songwriting and composition through rhythmic guitar loops, abstract theatre, interactive ritual, and myth-making. Santos’ work is influenced by Indigenous Filipino psychology, Kali as a decolonized combat art, the feminist occult, plant medicine and ecology, BIPOC land revolution movements, genderqueer fluidity, and pleasure autonomy.
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About
An interactive installation that aims to cultivate cultural intimacy through intersectional decolonization practices, Tree + Oyster create loops as a ritual to stoke embodied memory to supplant historical erasure. Through myth making and tool use, they facilitate small groups co-creating bridges from the land to sea imagining sustainable ecologies.

Statement of Intent

With the aim to cultivate space for collective trust and shared dreaming, Tree + Oyster arrive with non verbal communication via play to shed anthropocentric perspective and facilitate opportunity for emergent ritual.

We are curious to discover any cross-cultural parallels in land-water relationship between indigenous communities and our own personal decolonization research. Tree + Oyster merges archipelagic Indigenous mythologies from the Dominican Republic and the Philippines in order to stoke memory, resist erasure, and generate new mythologies.

We engage in immersive research deepening our relationship to land and community. From this foundation, we facilitate creative gatherings bridging inner and outer ecologies — a practice in tuning our personal, communal, and digital relationship to the landscape.

Site-specific gatherings consist of co-creation exercises and games, sensorial ceremonies, body mapping, collective altar building, and musical forest jams. Seasonal elements, i.e. sand, snow, and vegetation, will inform the location and structure of interactive installations. These onsite activations create a generative mediated space for communal storytelling.

As an accessible global extension, we share our process and the stories we cultivate in the community through passive documentation. The curated thread will mirror our in-person rituals with wordless communication using images, audio, and video of native flora and fauna, encouraging participants from all over the world to form similarly playful and connective bonds with their environment. They are invited to respond with their own documentation, thus remediating their relationship to an often-chaotic and work-oriented digital space.

Rooted in the study of Indigenous histories, local-to-global community, and ecology, we aim to build a cross-cultural campfire generating warmth, in the empathetic pursuit of sustainability.
Art partners
Jennae Santos, Oyster / Gushes, gushesmusic.com
2022 — Present

Brendan Bo O'Connor, Lucid Dream Minigolf
Asst Prof Psychology & Neuroscience
2022

James Bennet, Sound Designer
2022



Contact
2022

Tree & Oyster