Performance: Our Collective Becoming

Our Collective Becoming: A Performative Exploration of Gold’s Impact and Meaning

An in-gallery performance activating Tatiana Echeverri Fernandez’s installation 

Performances occur in two 15 minute cycles:

4:30pm & 5:00pm

Our Collective Becoming is a performance by artist Tatiana Echeverri Fernandez activating her installation on view at MOCA in the Frequencies exhibition. The piece examines gold as both a material and a historically contingent force, shaped by ecological, economic, and sociopolitical structures. Through shifting tableaux vivants, performers embody gold in its various states—fluid, weighted, luminous, and burdened—tracing its trajectory from geological formation to extraction, commodification, and symbolic representation.

Foregrounding the violence of extraction and the displacement of land and people, the performers enact gold as both substance and site—the earth it is torn from, the laboring bodies that shape it, and the void left in its absence. The audience assumes the role of witness, observing an evolving interplay of stillness and disruption. The performance underscores gold’s paradox: a symbol of permanence and value that simultaneously registers histories of loss and exploitation. With performers Camille Misty and Jaden Ramsey.

About the artist

Tatiana Echeverri Fernandez grew up in Medellín, Colombia; Rotterdam, The Netherlands; and the Ruhr area, Germany. She studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where she was a master student under Rosemarie Trockel, and earned her Master of Fine Arts in 2005 from the Royal College of Art in London. Her work has been exhibited internationally at renowned institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Shedhalle, Zurich; Triangle France, Marseille; and the Barbican, London. Her works are represented in numerous private and public collections worldwide. She has received multiple awards and grants throughout her career, most recently the grant for artistic research from Kunstfonds Bonn in 2024.