Carrying Capacity was a performance for two separate sites in 2026. In July, it was performed as Carrying Capacity: Venice for PERFORMATICA-Venice: Corpus Migranté and in September, it was performed across two days for Art in Odd Places 2026: UTOPIAS as Carrying Capacity: New York.

Venice photos by Veronica Peña. New York photos by Robert Barbarello.

Carrying Capacity: Venice was a durational performance examining the migrant body as a container of visible and invisible inheritances. Attached to my body were transparent bags, each holding materials that speak to memory, attachment, and loss.

As I ran, walked, crawled, and paused through the city's public spaces, my movements were non-linear, indecisive, but responsive to architecture, to bodies, and to the push and pull of what I carried.

The performance called viewers to witness the physical and emotional weight of migration/movement, not as a single act of crossing but as a continual process of becoming and unbecoming.

Carrying Capacity: New York was a performance that examined circulation, care, labor, and value within the urban environment.

Throughout each festival day, I slowly transported a 30-inch transparent sphere along a continuous route through the designated festival corridor, repeatedly lifting, carrying, and lowering, the sphere in an ongoing cycle.

Neither sculpture nor prop, the sphere recalls an artwork, a luxury commodity, a sacred vessel, or a burden requiring continual care. The first day, the festival zone was between 1st and 3rd Avenues on 14th Street, an area near hospitals, residential buildings, and service networks; the act of carrying was suggestive of caregiving, protection, and invisible labor.

On the second day, further west between 6th and 10th Avenues and near retail districts, galleries and areas of tourism, the identical gestures entered systems of spectacle, consumption, and exchange.

The repetitive actions transform ordinary movement into sustained labor, and the sound elements emanating from inside the sphere invited passersby to reconsider the possibilities of everyday life through sustained attention to poetry, music, breath, and animals in nature.