LovingSUITS is an ongoing series of performances where Dominican women and nonbinary folks are invited to share in community memories around love, family, and migration while interacting with soft weighted sculptures. Since the pandemic started, LovingSUITS has moved into the digital realm - creating intimacy through different time zones and sharing self-care techniques in the age of social distancing. As part of Flux Factory’s “Nobody’s Fashion Week,” “LovingSUITS: Abya Yala + Decolonizing Love” was hosted on October 13, 2020. For the first time, folks outside the Dominican identity were to experience the series.

In this iteration participants were asked to identify the ancestral land they are on alongside their names and pronouns on the Zoom chat. As they did this, the artist explained the performance’s name and intent behind collective symbolic actions. Even if one is in a virtual space, the lands where our physical bodies are provide context. One can visualize and imagine the physicality beyond floating squares in our screens; who’s where, who was there and the colonial erasure they endured.

“What is your first memory of love? Not romantic love, but pure love?” the artist prompted. Participants were invited to journal their answers and after a few minutes share with the rest. Memories around a mother’s embrace, nature, and siblings were recognized across the different boxes on the screen. As people recounted their memories, others were coming in closer to their screens as if to create intimacy, closing their eyes, holding their own hands, laying in bed.

As the performance evolved some cameras that were off started to come on, the energy transformed into an intimate and vulnerable one. “What would you like to purge from this land, your body, or society?” said the artist in their last prompt, this time inviting everyone to write their desires in the chat. The need to purge distrust and fear, greed and hate, and society’s need to define and police others were identified by the collective.

“To heal is a verb, to love is a verb,” the artist claimed.

Participants were invited to hold the limits of their box and reach out to the person next to them and connect while looking at each other. A grid of interconnected hands, smiles and all across different lands and time zones.

“Using words and the symbolic as a catalysts for action, may the symbolic lead to action: We are not alone.”