Sensitive Material
A communal reconstruction of memory, safety, and the objects we inherit from trauma.
Co-conceived and created with an anonymous collaborator.
In August 2024, in Valencia, Spain, I collaborated with an anonymous artist to create a collective ritual with a group of women. At its center was an archive she had assembled: hospital bills, legal documents, family photographs, certificates. The material residue of a hidden life that she had spent years collecting, organizing, and protecting. The decision to make it art, and to make it communal, was hers.
We passed these fragments slowly from woman to woman, some of whom shared no common language, as written prompts guided their reflection.
What is safety? Whose job is it to protect? How do we transform an object? How do we transform memory? What counts as sensitive material?
She sat at the center of the circle by candlelight — meditating, watching, releasing — as her past was handled and witnessed. I held the perimeter as the hours unfolded in silence. We closed with a tea ritual and returned the materials in new formations: changed, perhaps, simply by having been held.
The project emerges from what is most primordial in theatre: ritual. Together, we proposed a method for working with personal and political archives as a form of artistic expression that moves toward social justice, communal care, and shared accountability. The work asks how we listen, how we witness, and how we build systems that honor the stories we carry.
It also opens into larger questions we kept returning to in our process: What do we believe safety is? What are we protecting, and who is qualified to build systems of protection? How do we collect the private data stored in the file cabinets of our hearts? What is public, what is private, and who decides?
She has since continued transforming the archive; dying, destroying, repurposing, and reassembling its materials into sculptural collages. The archive is no longer only a record; it is an evolving object, reshaped through ritual, art-making, and witness. Our collaboration continues.
Sensitive Material asks whether transformation happens in the act itself, or in the moment others bear witness. It asks what an archive can become when it is held collectively.
Trabajo Práctico. Valencia, Spain. 2024
