LIMBS
Unidentified Body Parts Collective
Clay, earth, fire, performance, and community collaboration
"Limbs” is a series of gatherings where we can co-create our rituals of regeneration. As destruction of lands, shelter, peoples, hopes and ideals continues under the hands of out of control, self-righteous, weaponized humans, we can grow the ability and imagination to create & perform our rites of healing, instead of entrapping our wounds with trauma and despair.
In the first art making ritual, we invite communities to gather and create clay limbs in honor of the countless bodies we have witnessed in pieces over the last years. The second, “Blastema” , fires the clay in the earth through a collective ceremony of poetry, song and story. The third invites you to experience and connect to the charred limbs as portals to parallel realities that are inexorably intertwined with our own, with the burning possibilities in our hearts. The exhibition includes an unearthing ceremony and an installation of the Limbs sculptures.
All related artwork sales and ticket sales support reconstructive limb surgery and grass roots relief initiatives responding to the humanitarian and shelter disaster in Gaza and Lebanon via the The Ghassan Abu Sittah Children’s Fund.
Fundraising Exhibition at Mendocino Art Center, 2026
Photographs by Nikolas Zvolensky
Photographs by Nikolas Zvolensky
About Unidentified Body Parts
Unidentified Body Parts are made up of numerous creative hands and bodies. At a time where regional powers and imperial powers wage their wars for primacy, and peoples populate their statistical maps as civilian casualties and unwilling victims. We all face the risk of becoming numbers, our personal stories erased and our social fabric atomised. Yes, bombs might melt our features into unidentifiable mucks and if we’re privileged enough to avoid the bombing, our critical political thought might be detained and our opinions,
bodies and faces tracked and our rights dispossessed. We thus freely choose to be unidentified, as an act of free will, as a way to pay homage to all those whose shattered bodies remained unidentified and as a yearning to melt into the collective creative body.
LIMBS was made possible through the support and partnership of:
Dear friends, comrades. and all who showed up, made connections possible, and gave from the heart
Environmental Art and Social Practice department, Santa Cruz; & Dean’s Award for Excellence, University of California, Santa Cruz
Indexical
Palestine Heirloom Seed Library
Andy’s Woodshop, Santa Cruz
Santa Cruz Clay Studio
Highland Art Center
Bread and Puppet Theatre
Vermont Day Dreams Studio
Mendocino Art Center
Mendo For Palestine