New Spiritualities: Film as Ritual

Ayida curator Serubiri Moses and ICA Assistant Curator Egbert Vongmalaithong select short experimental films by Alicia Díaz and Patricia Herrera; bryan ortiz, Mariana Parisca, and Luis Vasquez La Roche; Thomas Allen Harris; Tesora Garcia; and Serubiri Moses. All explore themes central to the current ICA exhibition Ayida, including syncretism, spirituality, and migration.

Be advised: This screening is for mature audiences. Some works contain nudity and sexual content.
This event was orignally planned for January 29 but was postponed due to inclement weather.
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Luis Vasquez La Roche and Wendy La Roche, The Cleanse, 2022, 9 min.

The Cleanse is a ritual dedicated to Oya, goddess of the wind, tornadoes, and cemeteries. The ritual takes place at a sugar cane plantation in Couva, Trinidad, and Tobago. Parts of this sugar estate have been turned into a golf course, a secondary school, a cemetery, or a cricket field, without any acknowledgment of its history or of the enslaved and indentured people whose labor shaped and sustained this land.

Thomas Allen Harris, Heaven, Earth, and Hell, 1993, 25 min.

Rich and inventive, Heaven, Earth, and Hell is an experimental narrative documentary that charts a course through African, Christian, and Native American cosmologies to tell a tale of love, loss, and a search for freedom in two parallel interracial relationships. Reflecting on the “trickster” figure in African and Native American culture, while recounting the story of his first love, Harris creates a graceful, deeply moving lament for the loss of innocence in a world without magic. This beautiful work incorporates the critical texts of Frantz Fanon, bell hooks, and James Baldwin.

Serubiri Moses, Je Prends la Parole, 2015, 5 min.

Je Prends la Parole (“I rise”) is a moving-image work that traces a character’s journey from silence to self-realization. Responding to Aimé Césaire’s warning against passive spectatorship, the film enacts enunciation and political liberation as an unfolding psychological transition. Through the effects of shifting light, gesture, and the presence of fire, we witness independence, historical change, and spiritual growth.

Alicia Diaz and Patricia Herrera, ruinas: bagazo (ruins: bagasse), 2025, 14 min.
Alicia Diaz and Patricia Herrera, ruinas: guardianas del dolor (ruins: guardians of sorrows), 2025, 8 min.

Ruinas (ruins) is a series of filmed performance interventions created within the ruins of Central Aguirre, an abandoned sugar mill in Salinas, Puerto Rico. Co-created by movement artists, musicians, visual artists, and community members, the project brings to light a history of extraction and exploitation of people, labor, and natural resources.

Tesora Garcia, Ecstatic Visions from Outerspace, 2024, 5 min.

Shot across Washington, D.C.’s imperial monuments, the film follows Tesora Garcia as she engages in somatic, insect-kin rituals—placing tropical roaches into a glass cranium, walking in rain, hanging upside down. A bilingual voiceover threads dream logic with geopolitical grief: “Pocahontas came to me in a dream and told me I had been immunized… How many children have died in Gaza?” This work marks the transition into art as prophecy and the transfeminine body as embodied sigil.

bryan ortiz, Mariana Parisca, and Luis Vasquez La Roche, En el Cielo del Abajo (Being Held and Flown in What Was Never Silence), 2025, 7 min.

In En el Cielo de Abajo, we make an offering to spaces that have been ignored, oppressed, and erased. We listen through our skin to the vibrations of the earth. We come together to remember how to communicate beyond information and let go of our forms in revelry.

Colin Robinson reading Assotto Saint’s poems at Saint’s memorial, public domain, 10 min.

Poems by Assotto Saint (1957-1994), whose heroic life was a core inspiration behind the Ayida exhibition, are read aloud at his memorial by poet Colin Robinson (1961-2021). A close friend of Saint’s, Robinson was a Trinidadian poet and HIV/AIDS activist who moved to New York City in 1981.