II.
Strange Fruit 0
Trash the Musician
31 May 2026
Alligator Alcatraz
Strange Fruit 0 is a site-specific endurance piece that collapses the boundary between sacred witness and profane violence. Invoking Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0, the work positions the detention center gate as a threshold of exclusion. Rather than waiting for the audience to inflict pain, the artist enacts violence upon themselves to expose the latent brutality of the state.
By singing Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit while kneeling on a Brazilian flag at the edge of kinetic traffic, the performance transforms the body into a site of “diasporic” testimony. The final act of self-marking with fingernails until bleeding, physicalizes the lyrics’ “bitter crop,” asserting bodily sovereignty in a space designed to nullify it.
I.
I Sit Here and Watch
Trash the Musician
11 May 2026
Orlando City Hall
I Sit Here and Watch is a site-specific civic performance staged within the procedural structure of a public city council meeting. Working inside the official three-minute public-comment limit, Trash the Musician treats municipal procedure as score, podium as instrument, body as archive, and testimony as performed evidence.
The piece begins in institutional respectability: a black blazer, lapel pin, paper in hand, and equal footing with the civic officials across the chamber. As the testimony unfolds, the artist sheds the blazer to reveal academic regalia and honors cords, then unzips the gown to expose a red and silver sequined performance body. Speech becomes song. The chest and podium become percussion and victim. The artist’s body absorbs painful force in real time as the lyric invokes bodily frailty and harm.
The final reveal is a folded Brazilian flag drawn from the inner breast pocket and held over the face. The artist disappears behind the national symbol, shifting the work from individual confession to collective embodiment: not “look at me,” but “this is us.” The artist then exits without observing the reaction of the council or audience, removing the institution’s power to grant or deny emotional closure.