I wanted my performance to be a meditative exercise which includes a significant number of persons in the audience. My aim was to invite them to contemplate on the things which keep them attached to this world, and for them to participate in an exercise of letting go of such things.

And so, at the beginning of the performance piece, I asked the participants to find seven stones and seven leaves in the surrounding area, and afterward to write the seven things they feel they are most attached to, onto the leaves. The participants then walk down a pathway which I named the “Avenue of the Dead”, on which I had drawn seven black circles. At each circle the participants would have to stop and make a brief meditation, and see if they could let go of one of those seven things they had written. If they could let it go, then they leave that leaf behind (with a stone resting on top so as to keep it in place). The exercise is completed once the participants have passed all the circles. At the end, the participants sit with the artist in a circle and discuss their experience of the meditative exercise.

Materials: Black paint (to paint words and symbols on the stone path), stones, leaves