A collaboration between edua mercedes, Luis Motta, Lucho T. Cervantes, and Miller Robinson

This performance emerges from northern Indigenous California story about Abalone Woman, reimagined through the lens of trans and queer kinship and the intersections of Indigenous and migrant resilience. On the shoreline, three collaborators gather around an abalone and kelp-like suit, peeling back its layered skin to reveal a joyous body beneath. The act of shedding becomes both a ritual and a rebirth, echoing the ways queer kinship networks strip away imposed coverings to uncover interdependence, intimacy, and collective care.

The performance draws on the ecology of the abalone and kelp forests, where survival depends on mutual reliance: abalone clear kelp’s holdfasts of encrusting life, kelp provides their only food source and shelter, and countless others share in this exchange. Like these aquatic relationships, queer and migrant communities build networks often through shared grief and vulnerability that harmonize land, body, and spirit— creating spaces of healing through reciprocity. In the revelation of the body from within the shell, the collaborators invoke a vision of kinship that is exposed, celebratory, and necessary for survival.