In the “Instructions for Becoming” photographic and video series, I instrumentalizes my body an act of propositional synergy with elements in nature trees, rocks, mountains, waterfalls , roots, —what performance studies scholar Rebecca Schneider calls, “queer lamentations.” It enables a kind of “return,” I am thinking of trees as witnesses, and also both as landscape and beings which are interconnected through intricate root systems. I’ve been obsessed with trees since I was a little boy, so it’s not just returning to my roots as a migrant in the metaphorical sense but also as a child. In one photograph, I stretch my body out across a Bursera Simaruba, commonly known as Indio Desnudo [naked Indian], because, a it sheds its bark, as a way of expelling parasitic species. In another, I lie across a Taxodium mucronatum, commonly known as ahuehuete (Moctezuma cypress)—named after the Aztec emperor who confronted the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés—beside the pool of water where he was born. In these intimate portraits with nature I trace and mourn, draw strength from, and pay homage to the roots of non-human kinships and pre-colonial heritages.

I continues the series in an accompanying video shot at a waterfall in the Hudson Valley, on the sacred homelands of the Munsee and Muhheaconneok people, who are the original stewards of the land. Positioning my body along the riverbed in various poses over eight hours, I attempt to join the stream—its movement and simultaneous ablution—while I try to breath inside of the waterfall. These performative acts attempt to rejoin nature as a distant relative that connects one to homeland and constitutes an alternative journey of becoming and healing. On another piece, I hold a Saguaro in the dessert of Arizona, and lay on top of a mountain until I lost consciousness of my body.