2000 years from East to West

RTePresenta tu marca

Text by Ang Sion. New York 2012. Ongoing Project.

Her performative series of photographs, 2,000 Years From East to West, came from an impulse to document similar moments of initiation as a woman, and map the connections between spiritual and physical place.

For the past ten years, she has been making ceremonies as personal ritual wherever she has travelled. This project was a way to begin documenting them.

Leyre performed a ritual for the first photograph in New York at the Brooklyn Bridge, which was symbolic of building a structure of convergence inside herself.

"I decided to find a long piece of red fabric as a symbol of the wound," she said. "It was a union between all my small ceremonies of the past, and a trace in time like the thread of Ariadne. On the bridge, I walked the length of the fabric in order to go through this metaphorical door of infinity and make it inside me."

She adds, “Everything starts with a door.” To open a door and go through implies a conscious decision to cross a threshold, emblematic of the cyclical passage of life, death and rebirth.

What could perhaps be seen as the place on the other side of the door is the location of the same ritual for the next photograph, the Pyramids of Giza. There in Egypt she walked up the steps of the pyramid with fifteen meters of red fabric trailing behind her, creating a striking, unexpected line of color against the stone of the ancient burial site.

Her next photograph will be made at Kailash Temple in Ellora, the archaeological site of the ancient Ellora caves in India. From there, she will continue to travel and perform the red fabric through ritual and photography, tracing a constellation of points between inner spiritual worlds and physical geography.