6'24" video
Filmed on the Isle of Arran, Scotland, 2015
On 24 December 2015, I visited the Machrie Moor standing stones on the Isle of Arran, Scotland. The stones date from the Neolithic period, between 3500 and 1500 BC. I went there at a moment of transition in my own life. I had just received permission to remain in the UK for the following four years, and I wanted to acknowledge the land I was about to inhabit.
I cut my hair among the stones and offered it to the landscape. My hair was part of my body, but also part of my personal history. Cutting it became a way of marking a change, leaving something behind and entering into a relationship with a new territory.
The gesture also connects with my relationship to Peruvian traditions of hair and weaving. Hair and thread carry memories of the body, of identity and of where we come from. Through this action, I brought together two places and two cultural experiences, using the act of offering as a way of connecting them.
For me, the work is about arrival and belonging. It is about entering a place that has its own history and asking how I might become part of it without forgetting where I came from.
The performance became a small personal ritual: an acknowledgement of the land, of the stones, and of the possibility of beginning a new cycle.