shadow of a palm, 2024

Shadow of a Palm is a seven-minute performance created on a beach in Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic, where the artist engages in a quiet yet potent dialogue with the land of her ancestry. As a third-generation Dominican born and raised in New York City, Ventura locates her practice in offerings and ritual to spirit, creating performance as a pathway to commune with her motherland across time and distance. The piece emerges from an embodied mourning for the lost physical intimacy with place, and a desire to let the earth both hold and be held. The piece is a response to generations of displacement and separation…

The performance unfolds not in direct relation to a palm tree, but through its absence—its shadow. Moving intuitively across the sand, Ventura traces the contours of the palm’s silhouette, a gesture that renders visible the tension between what is present and what is unreachable. The shadow becomes a metaphor for diasporic condition: the tree itself is rooted, stable, physical, while its imprint is fleeting, intangible, and impossible to grasp fully. It is with this shadow—this spectral remainder—that the artist negotiates belonging.

To trace, Ventura pushes the sand – symbolizing labor. At the shadow’s center, Ventura inscribes a spiral, adorning it with baby coconuts gathered nearby. The spiral, an ancestral symbol of continuity and return, becomes an offering—an ephemeral altar that grounds her movement in ritual. This act is at once intimate and communal, personal and ancestral: a gesture of reciprocity with the land, a recognition of the spirits and histories that persist in place, and an attempt to re-weave the strands between body, earth, and lineage.

Shadow of a Palm situates itself within a larger body of diasporic and eco-spiritual performance practices that engage nature as collaborator, witness, and archive. Through minimal means, it foregrounds the poetics of absence and the possibilities of ritual as a bridge between distance and return.

This piece made in October 2024 marks Ventura’s start of an ongoing series of performance works with the land.

Watch the full video in 4K here.