Across cultures and centuries, the red thread has been tied around wrists, strung between trees, woven into lullabies. It is the oldest prayer we know how to make with our hands.

RED THREAD is a living ceremony for our current moment — an outdoor, participatory performance installation in which community members come together to witness and weave protection into the landscape.

RED THREAD unfolds simultaneously in two spaces — the gallery and the land — creating a living world that visitors move between freely. Inside the gallery, women in long red dresses sit in the space, weaving protective charms from red thread: a slow, meditative performance of making

Outside, the trees are waiting. The red thread moves between them like a sentence being written slowly, collectively, across the land. Outside, the entire community is invited to weave the landscape itself — tying thread to trees, winding yarn through branches, threading protection into the earth. The work moves from personal into collective healing: from the private grief that each person carries into the shared, visible, embodied declaration that we are still here and still hold each other.

This is performance that does not separate audience from participant. Community is invited to participate in co-creation.

Why This, Why Now?

We are living in a time of profound rupture — of violence, injustice, and the slow unraveling of the social fabric that holds communities together. Our mind knows it, our body knows this, our spirits know it. It is easy to feel overwhelmed with grief and anger or to feel numb. These feelings need a container.

RED THREAD offers a container. It draws on the universal human impulse to work with ourhands when we lose our words — the impulse to tie a knot, to come together and weave, to mark a tree, to say: this place is sacred, I am a witness.

Join us. This event is donation based. Your generosity helps events like this happen Suggested donation is $20.00

Irina Wen, PhD | Artistic Co-Director