Ancestor Worship premiered at Joseph Nease Gallery (Duluth) in summer 2023.

In October 2022 I visited all the places my immigrant ancestors left behind. I went searching for graves, the parents of my grandfather, the parents of my great-grandparents. Burials that were tied to land and history, the land and history that shapes who I am - although I grew up and live over 3,000 miles and an ocean away. For centuries, my ancestors literally became a part of this earth, their bones, their flesh became the earth that then grew the food they ate, the materials they used to survive, the earth that provided their places of comfort and refuge. My ancestors were the earth they left to move here, to what we call the United States of America - earth they hadn't know, earth other humans had known.

What happens to our relationship with land when it is new, when it no longer holds the artifacts and remains of those who gave us our genes? And how has the truncation of this centuries-old cycle allowed American culture to abuse the symbiotic and reverent customs of the people who have been here for so long? Is there any point of healing and reconnection?

I found the grave of my great-great grandmother by accident in Oulunsalo in northern Finland. My genes as earth, by accident, in a cemetery in a method of burial brought to that area through Christian customs just hundreds of years ago. A cemetery filled with care and reverence and kindness and community. And while planting flowers at her lonely, weathered headstone, I felt the depth of the cycle of life and earth.

Composition, field recording, and video / Sara Pajunen