I Inherit the Water
I Inherit the Water is an ongoing, multi-disciplinary project that examines inheritance as something carried not only through bloodlines and archives, but through water, land, and the body itself. Moving across performance, video, sculpture, collage, and writing, the work considers water as both material and metaphor — a witness to histories of migration, indenture, displacement, and survival.
The project emerges from diasporic memory and ancestral rupture, tracing how histories shaped by colonialism and capitalism continue to surface in contemporary life. Water appears as a connective tissue: between geographies, generations, and temporalities; between what has been remembered, erased, and transformed. It holds grief and resilience simultaneously, functioning as a site of mourning, transmission, and possibility.
I Inherit the Water unfolds non-linearly, with gestures, images, and texts recurring and mutating across forms. Rather than progressing toward a fixed conclusion, the work develops in a spiral — reflecting the way inheritance is lived: fragmentary, embodied, and unresolved.
The opening gestures of the project took place through two performances in India. Initiation, a public performance, occurred on November 8, 2025 at Kali Ghat in Patna and on the grounds of the Patna Museum, marking the project’s emergence through ritual, site, and collective witnessing. This was followed by Aaji’s Leela, performed on November 15, 2025 at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, which drew on memory, lineage, and embodied storytelling as a way of engaging ancestral presence.
Together, these performances initiated I Inherit the Water as a living inquiry — one that continues to expand across mediums and contexts. At its core, the project asks how we live with what we have inherited — environmentally, culturally, spiritually — and how we might tend to those inheritances with care, accountability, and imagination.
