The Art of Walking / Pilgrimage as Performance: Gisela Insuaste’s walking talking seeing being: love, labor, and faith on 14th Street (Vacuum Story Pt 1)

When we walk, we begin the process of mapping, observing, and perceiving the visible/invisible paths that shift and transform beneath our feet. Walking provides opportunities to tap into (shared or individual) history and memory. To make a mark and tell stories in the natural and urban landscapes, either real or imagined. 
– Gisela Insuaste, Exploratory Walk: 1- Looking up and bending back around¹

There was one moment when I was in Fatima in Portugal… It was the first time that I felt the power of the masses—the massa. Every night there is this procession in this big plaza around the Virgin or a cross, and there were hundreds of people with a candle just walking around… You just had to let go, and I think that was powerful, realizing an action and a moment…: there’s a certain power—it’s like this energy or moment of vulnerability. 
– Gisela Insuaste, January 14, 2018²

What makes a walk a pilgrimage? And is a pilgrimage a pilgrimage without a walk? These questions have generated a lively and ongoing dialogue in the rapidly-expanding, interdisciplinary field of pilgrimage studies. An example that is invoked frequently is whether—for example—a hike along the Pacific Crest trail can be considered a pilgrimage. Usually, it comes down to whether the hiker set intentions (especially a sacred intention): to let go, to seek the divine, to connect to the natural world. The Camino de Santiago, a 500-mile journey through Spain to the tomb of the apostle James, popular in the Middle Ages and again today, is usually considered a pilgrimage by virtue of the walking experience, even for non-religious travelers. Conversely, confusingly, and even horrifyingly (for Catholics), pilgrims who travel to Lourdes, the grotto in France where the Virgin Mary appeared in the nineteenth century, for healing are sometimes jettisoned from the discussion altogether because the ambulatory aspect happens within the site, not while traveling to it. 

Likewise, certainly not all art that involves walking can be considered a pilgrimage. But triangulating these actions and concepts—walking, art, pilgrimage—can yield some compelling insights, especially as they relate to reconstructing memory.  Most sacred journeys can be seen as microcosms of life’s journey from womb to tomb, reflecting religious cosmologies—and even interior movements—in a physical way. The Camino de Santiago, for example, is a known trail marked by memory where many walkers report a tangible connection to those who have traveled the route before, and those who will do so in the future. The pilgrimage trail is anagogical across time and often space, collapsing temporal boundaries as past and present converge. Mapping one sacred geographic locus onto another can engender a powerful sense of ancestral connection for diaspora communities. This paper invokes a case study, Oakland-based artist Gisela Insuaste’s 2018 performance, walking talking seeing being: love, labor, and faith on 14th Street (Vacuum Story Pt 1), to explore a journey through not only geographic space, but across temporal boundaries.³ This essay draws from the traditional religious import of apotropaic pilgrimage objects in tandem with anthropologic consideration of ritual practices that have continued through acculturated Catholicism today to contextualize the continuity and reflexiveness of the practice of pilgrimage as art. For in addition to the conversations about what makes a journey a pilgrimage, in an adjacent field, art historians continue to query the place of religion, ritual objects, and spiritual praxis in contemporary art.⁴

Figure 1. caminando inesperadamente, Gallery 400 (University of Illinois at Chicago, 2004), images c/o Gisela Insuaste, used with permission.

Gisela Insuaste’s performance, walking talking seeing being, performed twice over the course of a weekend in October of 2012, engages an embodied praxis that involves aspects of pilgrimage such as collecting souvenirs, leaving material offerings, and participating in officialized and spontaneous rituals in order to forge a communitas across time through tactile, haptic remembrance.⁵ In this case, it is an extra-temporal communitas-through-culture spurred by the collecting, assemblage, and distribution of meaningful objects while on a walking pilgrimage through New York City—an urban environment onto which a memory of Insuaste’s native Ecuador was mapped. Like much of Insuaste’s oeuvre, walking talking seeing being was based on ritualized perambulations through an intentionally mapped-out zone while bearing a public invitation to touch and interact with assembled objects. Insuaste’s performance connected past and present, body and belief. 

In an essay on “ambulatory knowing, pedestrian movement, and temperate experience” the British anthropologist Tim Ingold invokes the fourth-century theologian, St. Augustine, in order to argue that “a mindful body that knows and remembers must also live and breathe. A living, breathing body is at once a body-on-the-ground and a body-in- the-air.”⁶ This brings to mind Insuaste’s ca. 2004 installation, caminando inesperadamente, at Gallery 400 in Chicago (Figure 1), which was comprised of sculptural structures and wall drawings created while walking on stilts. The viewer was meant to use their body to stretch, crane, look down and up, and trace the drawings and wires wrapped around wooden supports.⁷ Curator Annie Morse comments on the title’s wordplay: “‘Caminando inesperadamente’ may be loosely translated as ‘walking unexpectedly,’ but its roots lie in ‘esperanza,’ or ‘hope.’” It is a hope in motion, which Morse ties to a sort of visual anagogy, or pilgrimage: “as long as there are answers still to be found, then the fragile structures on which we depend for understanding will provide support as the imagination makes its ascent.”⁸ In the case of walking talking seeing being, some structures were found, others collected, and still others assembled/created—each giving visibility to stories of trauma and healing, and especially her own family’s experience of emigration from Ecuador to the US in the 1970s.    

Insuaste is “interested in how the landscape and built environments shape our experiences,”⁹ and her artist’s statement describes the goal of seeking to connect her family’s story to the history of the city. Taking to the streets of New York, Insuaste physically (re)traced her family’s story of arrival and settlement on the Lower East Side after immigrating from Ecuador in 1973 (Figure 2). She started her pilgrimage at Desco Vacuum Cleaner (131 West Fourteenth Street), where her father first worked upon arriving in New York. Insuaste built a mountainous structure of bits of colored wood on top of an old vacuum cleaner–which, for her, became “a symbol of transformation and perseverance, shaping our identity and the American Dream.”¹⁰ As she hauled this mountainous, cart-like object down 14^th street she followed an itinerary that mapped her family’s journey, her return constituting a pilgrimage-within-a-pilgrimage: 

My dad working at vacuum cleaner factory… being able to take things apart in order to understand… to reimagine an object or space, that’s interesting to me—that’s what the walk was about, deconstructing, reconstructing, reimagining these spaces and acknowledging the past, the reconstructing that history… There’s a need to move—[to] gesture, you’re creating a space with your body, not just for yourself but to share with others.¹¹

She then proceeded to the Santuario de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe (229 West Fourteenth Street, today joined with Casa Maria Lopez and other former residences on West 15th Street, as well as part of St. Barnard’s parish), a site culturally significant as the very first Spanish-speaking Catholic parish. Founded in 1902 in the West Village, it was shared by many Spanish-speaking parishioners as well as neighborhood luminaries including social activist and co-founder of the Catholic Worker newspaper, Dorothy Day, Beat poet Jack Kerouac, and Thomas Merton, who speaks of the church in The Seven Storey Mountain.  Insuaste’s journey culminated at the Sanctuary–in the place in which she had been baptized–with the artist attending both the English and Spanish Masses.

Like much of Insuaste’s work, walking talking seeing being integrates Andean Quechua Indigenous religion and the Roman Catholic part of her heritage and family’s story. The tension between a recognition of the socio-economic and personal impact of postcolonial state hegemony and the historical trauma that has resulted with an intentional reclamation of ritual aspects of popular Catholic practice is part of what makes the piece so powerful.¹² Insuaste speaks to this interculturation as a shared trauma:

that has always existed—my existence here is the result of the clashing of people that have been here, people that came, and took and brought their own beliefs and systems, and recognizing that—trauma is also genetic… There’s […] fluidity in acknowledging the past and bringing it into the present… Making art or creating spaces allows for…history to sort of converge.¹³

For example, Insuaste created little offrenda—mementos and tokens—made of various materials, including silver and copper which recalled the earth metals that she remembers her uncle in Ecuador applying to the body as a way to cleanse from illness and affliction (Figures 4&5). The offerings were bound with wool, which she had carried back from Ecuador in 2004, and thread in the colors of Gran Colombia, the Ecuadorian flag, both used as a strengthening wrap, symbolic of protection, as in her other pieces. As natural fibers containing dye and soil, the material was particularly imbued with the trace of the landscape from which it was collected—and served as contact-relics, a form of Catholic popular piety involving prayer cards or objects touched to other objects in a kind of transfer-of-spirit from thing to thing.  The fibers and dirt became a tactile way to physically and symbolically map Ecuador onto New York City. 

Insuaste left behind votive offerings in the form of painted wood pieces and black vacuum belts that she had stacked on her arms like bracelets. She also used these rubber rings to connect and hold in place a mountain of wood stacked on the vacuum, which she dragged like a cart as she walked. These rubber rings appear in other sculptural pieces from this period of her work, including “vacuums en camino por el cielo y la tierra (mapping),” a 2012-2013 assemblage of repurposed wood forming a mountainous structure with Ecuadorean wool, silver pushpins, tape, string, paper, photographs, mirrors, and wood shavings, with some of the edges bound with vacuum cleaner rubber belts (Figure 3). In the podcast for (Un)making, artist Weston Teruya likened these vacuum belts to bumpers that offer protection, which resonated with Insuaste. 

The offerings also included pads of moss, which she associated with the Ecuadorean figure of a recumbent baby Jesus, el Niñito, that had been in her family for 44 years. In an interview about the piece, performance artist Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo called the figure of Jesus, who rests on the moss, a “repository of the migratory experiences”—a vessel of remembrance of the difficult journey across landscapes familiar and foreign.¹⁴ Insuaste talks about the moss also invoking the spirit of the apus, the Quechua word that describes the protective spirits of the Andes through which the landscape of Ecuador is translated into her work:

The apus are who I acknowledge when I ride my bike across the Oakland Hills…when I take the ferry across the river or swim in the cold ocean… Those spirits are everywhere—in the cracks of a sidewalk where weeds push through the cement, in the lichen of a tree that has fallen. Gestures, whether they [are] made with my hands, my body, or a tool, [create] a line in space that connects heart, mind, and the physical environment.¹⁵

These apus are part of the Pachamama, the Great Mother who is the earth itself: the one who sustains, nourishes, but can also destroy through great earth-forces forces like lightning and earthquakes.¹⁶ In Indigenous cosmology, the more-than-human¹⁷ earth beings have different degrees of agency ‘and geographies of influence, which create nested hierarchies of reach’.¹⁸ For Insuaste, this manifests as a deep reverence for the mountain guardians and spirits who can be called upon for guidance and protections.  

The objects that Insuaste used to create these intentionally-assembled votive offerings were either collected on pilgrimages within Ecuador (wool, dyed thread) or connected to devotional objects, like the moss which references both the apus and the processional el Niñito figure. By attaching these offerings onto the cast iron gates, Insuaste spurs a multivalent experience as passers-by are invited to see, to touch, and to participate in her performance. The performance thus brought together objects collected on pilgrimage (and redistributed) and walking. There is a conjunction of content, form, meaning, and process as she physically imbues fourteenth street with materials from Ecuador. 

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Insuaste’s walking talking seeing being performance culminated at a Marian sanctuary which is, in and of itself, a “translation”—a transfer of spirit in the same vein of these objects collected from Ecuador (Figure 6). Just as the sacred landscape is reconstructed in the form of assemblages of moss and wool hung on iron railings, the New York sanctuary signals both Guadalupe in Extremadura, Spain, and the major pilgrimage basilica dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe near Tepayac in Mexico City—where the sacred tilma, or cloak, on which the Virgin’s image miraculously appeared to St. Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin (1474– 1548) in December of 1531 and remains today, is enshrined and visited by millions of pilgrims annually. 

Insuaste recalled a moving and significant moment at the Spanish Mass, where she overheard a child asking about the mountain-like structure that she was pulling, made of colored pieces of wood. The child’s mother likened it to a fogata—a bonfire. In an interview with the author Insuaste noted the profundity of that moment, which spurred her to reflect on the cleansing and renewal aspects of the piece. In this idea of burning, cleansing, and renewal (as in a forest fire which clears away the underbrush) there is a relationship to traditional practice, whether intended or fortuitous. In a practice popular among pilgrims, this sometimes takes the form of collecting a rock or stone ascribed with a symbolic status (sometimes representing a vice or something the pilgrim wants to let go) and then leaving it somewhere along the way. ‘[T]o walk is to privilege continual passage while still respecting the striations of places,” writes Daniel Sack in a recent essay on artist Tim Robinson: “their histories and the discomfort of our own pedestrian becomings as we stumble about in the space between.”¹⁹ Insuaste’s performance engages embodied movement to achieve this, but also traditional religious rituals. Her attendance of Mass and the creation of ex-votos invite her and those she encounters to enter into a liminal “space between” where the chasm between past and present collapses. This is one of the goals of the intentional pilgrimage—to engender an experience of extra-temporal communitas through haptic engagement, imagination, and participation in prescribed and spontaneous ritual: walking talking seeing being.

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1. Insuaste, Gisela, Exploratory Walk: 1 from Saunter Trek Escort Parade… (S.T.E.P.), curated by Christina Freeman, Emireth Herrera and moira williams at Flux Factory and Queens Museum’s Community Partnership Gallery, September-December 2018, available on Squarespace.
2. Insuaste, Gisela. Interview with author, Berkeley, January 14, 2018.
3. I explored various aspects of Insuaste’s work through a critical framework adapted from Edith and Victor Turners’ idea of communitas (emphasizing the extra-temporal aspects spurred by culture, through an ethno-art historical approach, see also note 7 below) in chapter IV of my book Imaging Pilgrimage: Art as Embodied Experience (London: Bloomsbury, 2022). I am grateful to the editors at Bloomsbury for permission to rehash some of details, which are recontextualized here based on the papers given at, and the discussion spurred by, the 2023 CAA panel on the Art of Walking.  
4. I refer here to Ronald R. Bernier and Rachel Hostetter Smith’s groundbreaking edited volume, which was, in part, a response to James Ekins’ 2004 essay on ‘The Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art’. See Bernier and Smith, Religion and Contemporary Art: A Curious Accord(New York: Routledge, 2023), ix + 464 pp.
5. I am borrowing Edith and Victor Turner’s term, often invoked in anthropology to describe feelings and sensations experienced collectively by a group of pilgrims. The term is helpful in describing the complex reception of a symbol vehicle as a site of community where, through the act of viewing, the beholder connects to those who have seen the image before and those who will see the image in the future. Turner, Edith and Victor, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthroplogical Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), p. 13. 
6. Ingold, Tim, “Footprints through the Weather-World: Walking, Breathing, Knowing,” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16 (2010): S122. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40606068.
7. caminando inesperadamente was supported by the College of Architecture and the Arts, University of Illinois at Chicago, and a grant from the Illinois Arts Council. The exhibition materials can be accessed at the Gallery 400 website: https://gallery400.uic.edu/exhibition/caminando-inesperadamente/.
8. University of Illinois, Chicago College of Architecture Design and the Arts Gallery 400, caminando inesperadamente (Oct. 4 -22, 2005) exhibition notes, https://cada.uic.edu/schedule/caminando-inesperadamente/ (accessed 2/9/24).
9. Gisela Insuaste, portfolio website & blog: https://www.giselainsuaste.com/ (accessed 2 August 2019).
10. from a 2012 AIOP (Art in Odd Places) flier supplied to the author by Insuaste; for further information, see: http://www.artinoddplaces.org. 
11. Insuaste, interview with author, Berkeley January 14, 2018.
12. For more on the complexities of the socio-political context of Insuaste’s work, and its relationship to ‘subaltern geographies and decolonial projects in Andean Ecuador’ (pace Sarah Radcliffe), see Barush, pp. 183-189.
13. Gisela Insuaste, interview with the author, Berkeley, January 14, 2018.
14. Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo, in correspondence with author, 10/2/2019.
15. Insuaste in correspondence with author, Jan. 7, 2019.
16. Inge Bolin, Rituals of Respect: The Secret of Survival in the High Peruvian Andes (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), p. 32.
17. I am using the term ‘more-than-human’ intentionally in that it ‘refers to Andean ethnographies of indigenous cosmopolitics (rather than Actor Network Theory or posthumanism)’, see Radcliffe, ‘Pachamama, Subaltern Geographies, and Decolonial Projects in Andean Ecuador’, in Tariq Jazeel and Stephen Legg (eds.), Subaltern Geographies (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019), p. 137, n. 2.
18. Sarah A. Radcliffe, ‘Pachamama, Subaltern Geographies, and Decolonial Projects in Andean Ecuador’, 126.
19. Sack, D. “Walking In and Out of Place: the Pedestrian Performances of Tim Robinson,” in C. Collins and Caulfield, M.P. (eds), Ireland, Memory and Performing the Historical Imagination (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 32. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137362186_2

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  Kathryn Barush

  Kathryn Barush is Bertelsen Professor of Art History and Religion at the Jesuit School of Theology and the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA. She received a D.Phil. and M.St. in History of Art and Visual Culture from Wadham College, University of Oxford and a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College. She has published on topics relating to theories of visual perception, art, and pilgrimage in journals such as Apollo, the Brooklyn Rail, and the Journal of the British Archaeological Association. She is also the author of two books exploring these topics: Imaging Pilgrimage: Art as Embodied Experience (Bloomsbury, 2022; winner of the AAR Religion and the Arts award) and Art and the Sacred Journey in Britain (Routledge, 2016; TLS Books of the Year list). She founded the Berkeley Art and Interreligious Pilgrimage Project in 2022 and is currently directing a Luce grant project exploring the possibility of arts-driven pilgrimages as integrative medicine.