Sarah talks with multidisciplinary artist Alixa Garcia about Alixa's transformative experiences with art, her powerful personal stories of loss, and her impassioned work in social and climate justice. Alixa reflects on the role of imagination during times of collapse and the importance of creativity, awareness, and community in fostering resilience and healing. The episode includes an intricate exploration of grief as a ceremony and the potential for art to help heal even in the darkest places.
Transcript:
Sarah: [00:00:00] Hi, I'm Sarah Cavanaugh and this is Peaceful Exit. Every episode we explore death, dying, and grief through stories by authors familiar with the topic. Writers are our translators. They take what is inexpressible, impossible to explain, and they translate it into words on a page. My guest today is Alixa Garcia, a Colombian born, globally raised, multidisciplinary artist.
Sarah: She's an award winning poet, a climate organizer, a filmmaker, a published author, music producer, and an incredible DJ, which is a lot of things, and I can't even sum up everything she is. She travels the world, and I am so honored to know Alixa.
Sarah: Alixa, you have such a prolific art career, and it's almost as if art found you, and I [00:01:00] understand as a teenager, you were going through a very, very difficult time. And it sounds like that was the beginning of your life of creativity.
Alixa: I was a queer kid from two Christian pastors. And around that time, I had a very powerful moment, one with visual art and one with poetry.
Alixa: So the visual art one, I remember seeing a photograph of a woman in a magazine. I don't even know who she is. But the look in her eyes felt exactly how I was feeling inside. And I don't know what in me was like, I draw that. But I followed my intuition or my instinct or what have you, and I picked up some paper and a pencil.
Alixa: And to my surprise, I not only could draw her identical to the way she looked, but I captured the look in her eyes. And I showed it to an elder friend, not much older than me, but you know, like in their twenties. And I was [00:02:00] a teenager, so it felt significant at the time. And she was in the art world. And she said, I think you should submit this to UMass Hospital or UMass University, I forget because they're kind of in conjunction, at the time putting on an art exhibit slash contest for Latinx folks.
Alixa: And I won and the winning meant that your piece of art was at that entrance wall when you walked into the gallery opening night. And the same week, another friend asked me to go for coffee. And when we arrived, there was a poetry reading happening and I'd never experienced a poetry reading in my life. I didn't know that could happen with words, but I was shook, you know.
Alixa: And I went home and I wrote two poems and all week I was terrified to return and read them on stage, but I just knew I had to. Something in me, and you know, at the time I was super [00:03:00] shy, I barely had any friends in school. To get on a stage was the furthest universe from my existence. I went and there was a notebook and one side said open mic, the other side said slam, but I didn't know what a slam was.
Alixa: And so I just thought it was like slam, kaboom, kapow, we're very excited to be here. So I wrote my name in the slam side, wanting to be the very last person to be called upon. The emcee says, okay, our slam's about to start. And then he says, and our participants, and he reads the list of names, mine included.
Alixa: And I'm like, wait, What? You telling me you're about to compete? And, um, yeah, I ended up winning. I won the slam and because I won the slam that night, it made me eligible to compete for the citywide, which I won. Then it made me eligible to compete for regional, which I won [00:04:00] and got into a team. And by this point I'm like, I'm really into this is like a year later.
Alixa: Right. And then I win the regionals and I ended up going to nationals. I ended up being 11th place that year, and I was 16, 17 years old and I couldn't believe it, right? So there was this fire, this life giving fire. The muses, the ancestors, the guides, my creators all got on board and said, no, you are going to be on earth a little bit longer.
Alixa: And the muses gifted me art and poetry in the same week. And yeah, from there many things started to transform.
Sarah: My favorite class in college was a class called The Artistic Development of the Child, and I loved this class because what it said to me was my natural tendencies, they were innate, they were normal, everyone was born with creative spirit, but that over time oftentimes it's educated out of [00:05:00] us.
Sarah: What would you tell someone who's lost faith in their own creativity?
Alixa: What I can share is what I've done, you know, and the examples that I have. I don't know if I have so much advice and I'm not big on giving advice. Um, but I remember one time we were on tour and we had this project called Stitched. It says for stories, testimonies, intentions, truths, confession, healing, expressions, and dreams.
Alixa: And people would write one of those things on square pieces of fabric. And we would sew that fabric into eight foot tall by hundreds and hundreds of foot long. By the end of it, we had over 10, 000 of these colorful tapestry. It looked like a prayer flags almost, but vertical. And we were invited into a women's facility.
Alixa: And we brought Stitch with us. And what was so striking when we first entered is that the entire place was white, white walls, white fluorescent lighting, white floors. It was so absent of color. I couldn't [00:06:00] understand how anybody could heal in this place. And they took us into this, uh, You're going to work with all the young women.
Alixa: It was a juvenile detention center. We immediately got to wrapping this room in the colorful fabric. And I see all the guards looking through the window. And I was sure that somebody was going to tell somebody that it was illegal to have all that color in that space. When the women started coming in, they came in hard, or they came in.
Alixa: Sunken, you know and as they saw the color in the room, something shifted in them and then we started reading the stories of these perfect strangers who, the Beauty of Stitch is that it kind of feels a little bit like tarot or like Fortunately, you get the one that you need. There's thousands of them, but you just walk up to something and you read the story and it's your own story reflected or something that is so unbelievable to you.
Alixa: You're like, wow, if they can survive [00:07:00] this, then I can survive this other thing that I'm going through. We then moved into an exercise, a practice where we asked the young women to close their eyes and we did a multi sensory experience where all their other senses were activated. And one of the young women, the one that was actually the most shut down in the first half of the work, began to cry.
Alixa: And I expected her to open her eyes or to leave or to, but she just stayed there. She stayed with me. tears just streaming down her face. And it led into a writing piece. And at the end of the exercise, we asked them to share what it was for them. And she raised her hand immediately and was the first to say that she had never felt so free in her entire life.
Alixa: And here was this young woman who is In this historical, violent form of captivity, as a young Black woman, [00:08:00] prisons have affected Black and brown communities historically in this country. Policing comes from slave catchers, like the history is a dark one. And here she was with a shirt saying property of the state of Ohio, saying she has never felt so free in her life.
Alixa: And that's because art found her in that moment. Right? She was surrounded by art and art found her in that moment and she found art within herself in that moment and she could find her own freedom. So there's always ways in which art will find its way into the hollowest places inside the self and carve something beautiful out of it.
Sarah: Thank you for that story, which answers the question of what you might share to someone who has lost a loved one. That feeling, that feeling of freedom and their own creativity. So one of the things we talk about in Peaceful Exit is looking back, sort of, what is [00:09:00] our story around death and what experiences we've had as children and how that informs, and I know it informs your work.
Sarah: Did you experience loss as a child?
Alixa: When I was very young, I lost my mamita. She was my abuelita, my grandmother's mother, and I loved her dearly. We loved each other very deeply. And I don't remember the details of how I felt in that time, but my mom says that I was distraught. I was probably three or four, and she said that that was my first real heartbreak.
Alixa: And then, I mean, in a more general stance, I grew up in Medellin, in Colombia in the 80s, where there was a lot of violence because of the war on drugs. And there was a lot of death and there was a lot of instability and uncertainty. So that definitely has informed a lot of my peace work. [00:10:00] And then I have my own relationship with death.
Alixa: The next person that died that was very close to me was my best friend in high school. And it was actually very powerful because the night that she died, I had a dream. I was in a car and I was driving the car and there was a male next to me. I knew that he was a friend and my eyes were closed when I entered the dream.
Alixa: And I just kept saying in the dream, open your eyes, open your eyes. You're going to crash. And my eyes opened three times in the dream. The first time that they opened, I looked in the rear view mirror and I saw headlights. My eyes closed again. Again, I'm like, open your eyes, open your eyes, you're gonna crash.
Alixa: They opened, second time, and I saw the edge of the sidewalk in my headlights. They closed again. When they opened the third time, I saw in front of me a tree, a front lawn, the road that was coming down this hill, and it kind of curved to the left, and a white [00:11:00] house to the right. And pretty much as my eyes closed again in the dream, the car hit the sidewalk, rolled, and hit the tree.
Alixa: And it was the most physically intense dream I've ever had. Next day, I get a call. My friend Pedro tells me that Nikki has been in a car accident and has died and that there's going to be a memorial where it happened in a couple days. I show up and when I turn the corner, I see the hill and everything in me.
Alixa: I hadn't connected the dream, I'd almost forgotten it completely. And then I look at the hill and all the hairs in my back stand on end and I see the house, I see the lawn, I see the tree, and I ask, Pedro, what happened? And he says that Nikki and her fiancé were coming back with some friends from a party and [00:12:00] She fell asleep.
Alixa: She wasn't drunk. She was the designated driver. They hit the curb. The car spun. It hit the tree. And they were both lost on impact. And that was one of those moments in life where I was like, Oh wow. There are many truths happening simultaneously. And what is it that My dream world could expand so much so that I could be with Nikki in her body, with her, somehow sharing the same physical space in the last moments of her life.
Alixa: Um, so that, that was a very powerful moment for me with death. And then the second very powerful, my friend Tajim, I was in my mid twenties and he was just this bright, bright light, amazing human. And one day he was invited to create a musical stage for a new venue in Brooklyn. And he was working on the stage [00:13:00] platform when somebody knocked at the door.
Alixa: He opened it and he was shot multiple times in the chest and killed. It wasn't meant for him. It was like wrong place, wrong time. And when he died, a poem came for him. And I was writing the poem and I just felt his presence behind me. And I was like, what? And I turn around and he wasn't there. Nobody was there.
Alixa: But in that moment, the refrigerator door opened across the room. And refrigerators are sticky, they don't just open. And I was like, wait, what? And I was like, Taji, are you here? I was like, babe, I'm sorry if I was calling you too soon. Like, I just was writing a poem for you. I love you so much. And again, a memorial happened for him.
Alixa: All of his friends got together. And somebody started sharing funny stories about Tajim, and one of them was that he, so it was like, I don't know how he would know when we were sitting down for dinner, but he [00:14:00] always knew that exact moment, whether it was 7 p. m. or 10 p. m., and come inside and go directly to the refrigerator and open the refrigerator door and see what's inside to add to the feast.
Alixa: And then somebody else is like, he did that to me too. And somebody else is like, he did that to me too. And he just, it was this moment. I was like, Oh, okay. I see what's happening here. Right? So death is a very interesting thing.
Sarah: That's beautiful. Well, let's broaden out. Your work was rooted in the imaginal space and all of the things we've talked about relate to your work.
Sarah: Explain what the imaginal space is.
Alixa: Yeah, so the imagine of the way I use it in the way that I, that I draw an inspiration for my work, um, picture a caterpillar, right, in the process of a caterpillar becoming the butterfly. So the caterpillar becomes over [00:15:00] consumptive. before entering the cocoon light state.
Alixa: It eats, it eats, it eats, it eats and it suspends itself in this like suspended death state it enters and in that death it becomes goo and the very same juices it once used to digest food is the same thing that breaks it down and As the caterpillar begins to decompose, essentially, these imaginal cells are born, and the imaginal cells are the information code for the butterfly.
Alixa: Now, I love that the scientists call them imaginal in that moment because they became poets for a split second, because indeed they are keepers of imagination, right? And the immune cells who are vying for the caterpillar's as they have always known it. right? Because they want that caterpillar to stay intact.
Alixa: Attack the imaginal cells for being foreign, for being different, and for being unfamiliar. But the imaginal cells are [00:16:00] unaffected. They're almost in this space of choiceless awareness or maybe imagination. We don't know. And The imaginal cells cluster into bigger and bigger sectors, and eventually this butterfly is born, and they're unaffected, right, from the attacks of the immune body.
Alixa: And, you know, the caterpillars didn't know that it could fly 7, 500 miles. Um, you know, the monarch can fly from New York to Mexico. And to me, that's a great point of relation for us as a species right now. We have become over consumptive and in our over consumption, we are entering our own suspended death like state.
Alixa: And there are those of us in this dying that are seeing something else, that can feel something else. The thing about the imaginal cells is that no one imaginal cell has the entire information code for the butterfly. It's in their clustering that this other thing [00:17:00] comes to be, and I feel like it's very much how it is for us humans right now.
Alixa: There are those of us who have a vision, a glimpse, a little piece of our unseen worlds, and We are clustering and we're coming together despite and because of the cessation all around us. That's so much of the work that I've been doing the last 20 something years is like, how do we cluster us? How do we bring us together?
Alixa: How do we center imagination? How do we center creativity? And for the last, I would say four years for me, a real deep question is like, what is the role of imagination in times of collapse? When we think of the word collapse, we usually picture a disaster. But the etymology of the word comes from two words.
Alixa: Co meaning together, and lapse meaning to fall. So collapse means to fall together. Another inquiry I've been holding deeply is how [00:18:00] do then we fall together without falling apart. So, I'm always asking myself and asking us, can we hold in one hand this notion that creativity is the antidote to destruction, and in the other, that, yeah, we have this incredible capacity to fall together.
Alixa: At this time, we're makers, right? We're makers of our own lives. We're creators. And as creators, it is our responsibility, meaning our ability to respond in times of collapse by intentionally re engaging with creation, with the creative force and activating through the body, through the Soma, which is our living wholeness.
Alixa: what I call an awareness centered imagination. And you know, why awareness centered? Imagination in and of itself is not a liberatory practice. It just is not, right? Collectively, we have imagined a very [00:19:00] violent and volatile world. So those divisions, the divisions we have imagined into existence to categorize, to plunder, to own, are the very boundaries preventing us from encountering wholeness.
Alixa: But lucky for us, we have a very powerful tool in our human lexicon, and that is awareness. That awareness is committed to wholeness, right? So when we invite awareness into an imagination practice, our imagination seeks wholeness. The etymology of heal is whole, which means healing is wholeness. The word wealth, which derives from health, also speaks to wholeness.
Alixa: Yet we have turned things that ensure our health and our wealth and the wealth of our planet really, right, into transactional commodities and the inescapable impacts of such actions have left us in crisis.
Sarah: I know that you teach courses in this work, and we'll put a [00:20:00] link to your website in the show notes.
Sarah: You invited me to be part of a day around imagination infrastructures, and the session I was part of was entitled The Ultimate Imagination. And can you talk a little bit about, to you, what is the greater death? And how can we imagine a new story about death?
Alixa: The greater death from a human perspective is our species extinction.
Alixa: That is the greater death. Now, death always brings life, right? So there's that. And I don't know what will come after us, but right now, you know, we have transgressed six out of nine planetary bounds and, you know, consider these nine planetary bounds like the nine major organs of planet earth and six are failing.
Alixa: That's where we are. There's a climate clock in most. Major cities around the world counting down the data driven window we have to [00:21:00] avert the worst of the climate catastrophe heading our way. And that clock currently says five and a half years. I remember standing in Union Square and just seeing this clock counting down.
Alixa: You know, It's, it's, it's real. Like it really, when, when you know that the Arctic, Antarctic, the Siberian ice sheets have hit record highs, the glaciers are melting a hundred times faster than originally believed to be, uh, when 150 species are going extinct every single day. Right. Um, And then to get to the other part of your question, right?
Alixa: I have a dear friend, Isis Indria, who says, The conscious offering is the antidote to the extractive mind. And I couldn't agree more. The extractive mind has left us with this bewildered story. Colonization has left us traumatized. Extractivism is traumatizing. Ramping globalization will leave future generations traumatized and in crisis.
Alixa: But because awareness is committed to wholeness, [00:22:00] it provides an avenue for helping us to heal the bewilder story. And then turning bewilderment, right, which is a feeling of being perplexed or confused into wonder, which is to be with awe, requires a conscious act of intention setting. Uh, it's a process.
Alixa: of making sanctuary through intention and accountability so that the mundane can become extraordinary again. Water is extraordinary. Air is extraordinary. Fire is extraordinary. Land is extraordinary. Everything it provides is extraordinary. That we're positioned 150. 95 million miles away from the sun at the exact location where life is possible is extraordinary.
Alixa: Right? So the extractive mind is the one that disconnects us from the miraculous intrinsic nature of life. And so it is our responsibility now, if we are to be wisdom holders in this time, to remember our [00:23:00] offering so that we pay back our debt with interest. And I'm not talking about monetary interest.
Alixa: I'm talking about our interest of heart, our interest of mind, our interest of care and of deep culture. And it takes a lot of courage to be a life affirming human right now. It takes courage to approach with depth the things we are being asked by life to transform, to honor, and to heal if we are to keep participating in the miracle.
Alixa: There's this wonderful philosopher and poet, John O'Donohue, who once said, The depth of your approach to a thing will unearth the thing you are approaching to the degree that you honor it. We're being asked for depth right now, and it takes courage to be in this animistic exchange with life. But I will tell you one thing that I know to be true by sheer observation, is that nature resonates in the key of courage.[00:24:00]
Alixa: Think of a seed that breaks open in the cold, hard, rocky earth, sending tenderness, right, in search of sunlight, trusting absolutely. So this time is, is asking us to be courageous. and to lean into the unknown and what is at the heart of the unknown, if not imagination. So
Sarah: if you were speaking to the 20 somethings now, is there something that they can hold on to?
Sarah: Yes, poetry. Yes, art. Yes, All of the things that inspire awe in us. I'm just curious about those who feel this weight of the climate crisis. And you mentioned many things, melting glaciers, et cetera. What story might you tell them or what might you say to them?
Alixa: Um, um, I'm at an artist residency right now, actually, and I was speaking to a 20 something year old this morning, and we were talking [00:25:00] about this very thing.
Alixa: They said that they were born in the late 90s, and since they came into the world, they've known that they've inherited a crisis. They said the window to avert a crisis. The worst is about to close and I've barely gotten started. And then they said, but I'm going to go out fighting. And I'm going to fight until my dying breath.
Alixa: And what I shared with them is that for me, it is no longer about fighting, because what we resist persists. As I shared earlier, you know, this climate crisis window is closing rapidly. We have five and a half years left to curb the worst of this catastrophe heading our way. We oftentimes think of a crisis as the moment disaster strikes, but the etymology of crisis comes from the Greek word krisis, meaning decision, which means that a crisis speaks to a time when a difficult or important decision must be made.[00:26:00]
Alixa: It also is the turning point of a disease when an important change takes place, like the ancient forest, right? The ancient forest is internally wise and There's something beautiful, like the butterfly, right? There's these parallels, these stories in nature that we can draw from so deeply. Like the forest, for example, when it's young, it's over consumptive.
Alixa: Every plant in it for itself, every plant nitrogen, every plant carbon, every plant, right? And if the forest continued in that way, it would self implode. And there's a certain moment that the forest, moves from pioneering species, which is this time of overconsumption into what conservation scientists called succession species.
Alixa: And the succession species is when the forest becomes generous and the tree bends to allow more light. The plants stop growing and taking so [00:27:00] much so others can take. They share of their sugar compounds. There's a generosity that comes into play. And so I would share that with young people because we're at this point of either recovery or death.
Alixa: Because crisis is a turning point, there is an incredible opportunity for the unimaginable, the mystical, the wonder filled to emerge. There is a deterritorialization that is happening, right? The waters are rising, the earth is quaking, the storms are landing, the fires are burning, and The earth is asking for another world to emerge.
Alixa: All of us in the social and climate justice movements, anyone who wants to see a better world and transform the story that we're walking into is in a process of reworlding. Everything we do for that reworlding is a visionary practice. It is a practice in imagination. That's the first thing I would say.
Alixa: The second thing is [00:28:00] that instead Instead of fighting or resisting, I think this time is asking us to surrender. Let me explain, because I'm going to talk about giving up. There's actually a lot of action in surrendering, and I know that surrender in the Merriam Dictionary is defined as To yield power to, control, or possession of another upon compulsion or demand, but the etymology, the root of the word, suggests another interpretation.
Alixa: Surrender comes from two Anglo Norman French words, sur meaning surface or above, and render meaning to make. To surrender in this manner is An invitation to make from above rather than giving up or giving in. The reframing of this word is asking us to be active participants in a co creation with the unknown, with that which is just [00:29:00] beyond our realm of cognitive understanding and material supremacy, right?
Alixa: We are indoctrinated in the world of things. We uphold matter. As reality itself. And when matter breaks down, all is lost. We believe so strongly in this in part because we live in a production driven reality and we uphold production to the highest status. We uphold the car higher than the precious metals it came from or even the land those precious metals were once stored.
Alixa: But there are other energies at play here and when we bring into the equation of this time the frequency that Making from above, really surrendering, encourages. We make space for other allies and what my friend Celeste LeSing calls mystical solutions to appear. We are being asked to surrender to a [00:30:00] deeper noticing.
Alixa: And maybe from that deeper noticing, we can begin to envision and co manifest justice in thriving worlds. This is an act of reverence. for everything that brought us here. This moment is inviting us to become imaginal, to become vision seekers, you know, catchers of future moments untold, dream weavers despite and because of the cessation all around us.
Alixa: And then the last thing I would say is that that deeper noticing starts with the body. And in the body, deeply being with the body in its three dimensionality and understanding when we are in our thinking space, understanding when we're in our sensing space, understanding when we're in our energetic space, right?
Alixa: These time in part are asking for us to stretch our capacity. for discomfort. And so if we can be [00:31:00] with ourselves in, in our entirety, we can stretch our capacity to be in that discomfort. As we enter a time of chronic uncertainty, not collapsing discomfort with a lack of safety becomes ever so crucial.
Sarah: So many times I've heard you share the etymology of a word.
Sarah: And you give them so much color and context, and I think we both love language. Um, how do you think about the word grief in this space?
Alixa: I think that grief is our ceremony, and When we look at our grief as a ceremony, then it's not just a burden. It's not just this thing I gotta get through. It's not just this thing I was unlucky enough to have to deal with, right?
Alixa: And when it becomes a ceremony, then our wound becomes the portal. [00:32:00] And that's when some real powerful stuff starts to happen, right? And that's, that's really the focus of my work right now, you know, for a long time, as I said, I was trying to wake people up and be like, well, let's come on guys. And then I, you know, I like, I do.
Alixa: I want to believe in the mystical solution. Something miraculous might happen, but the likelihood is probably not, right? And we are in a process of extinction right now. And that's such a bummer because we live in a gift and For me, I just need to think about it beyond that. So the way I think about it beyond, I'm like, okay, energy cannot be destroyed.
Alixa: It can only be transformed. So how can we tend to the energetic field of us, that energetic space of us and within us? Be in reverence with life, afterlife, right? While we have these intellects, while we have these bodies, while we [00:33:00] have these heads, while we have these hands or these feet or this creativity, how do we do that work now so that the energy that cannot be destroyed can only be transformed after we go, enters into some semblance of alignment and so that we can as a species, die with dignity?
Alixa: And so much of that for me is trusting our feeling body to help us navigate the darkness, right? Human intellect as we know it is a very new phenomenon in the grand scheme of evolution. Our body, our animal bodies, our physical bodies have kept us alive much longer than our clever ideas. So it is safe to say that the body is the wiser of the two.
Alixa: So this time, I feel, is begging us to be more than do, to feel more than act, to breathe more than speak, to experiment and enter with curiosity and wonder into the great mystery of this time so that we may honor everything that [00:34:00] is beyond our calculations, our control, and our predictions. And I think this time is begging us to move away from this idea that we can make sense of things and instead surrender.
Alixa: To a sensemaking that is informed by a somatic rediscovery with life, through a reacquaintance with nature. We need to feel our way through this moment and become, once again, sensate witnesses in our collective experience. And yeah, this is where a lot of my work is recently centered in.
Sarah: Well, I think you're in the middle of a piece now that's who's next up in arms about gun violence.
Sarah: Tell me about that piece and how that ties into all of the themes we've been talking about.
Alixa: Yeah, it's a massive piece. It's eight feet tall by currently 50 feet wide. It will [00:35:00] eventually be more like 89 feet when it's completed. Um, and it's a pencil drawing on paper and it's called Who's Next Up In Arms?
Alixa: And it was inspired by the Sandy Hook shooting. I started it shortly after, maybe a year after. And that was the year that gun violence went up in the U. S. and it has yet to go down. It has only steadily gone up. And the portraits are children under the age of 12 who were killed by guns. during 2012 and 2013.
Alixa: And I'm actually here at this artist residency working on it. It's a very slow project because it's very taxing to be with, sit with, look into the eyes of children who were taken so violently. Um, and there's, there's spirits at time come and hang out and that's intense too. And, um, Yeah, it's a, it's a [00:36:00] heavy piece to, to carry and they're guiding it, you know, they're guiding themselves.
Alixa: It's not, I never thought of creating this piece because I would sell it or put it up, nothing. It's, it's literally just been this labor of love. They just want to be honored and they want to be honored so madly that, uh, they, they wake me up and they tell me, Hey, hello, come and work on me. Um, I was able to show it.
Alixa: On two different occasions, again, I think it's them. They were just like, okay, enough being in the closet, literally being in the closet when I'm not working on the monofile foot wall. And they were invited to an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art. And then another one in a museum in the Netherlands.
Alixa: And both times it's a whole interactive exhibit. So it's not just the art piece because I'm also a music producer. Um, I created a whole soundscape and it's [00:37:00] all motion and light censored. So when the audience walks into the space, the room is dark. And then as they move through the space, they, their presence is lighting up and showing light on these children.
Alixa: And as they move through the piece that the piece, they were just standing in front of goes back into darkness. And then the next piece lights up and people are invited to As they walk in, take a blank piece of paper, and while they're in that process, write a note for somebody who's lost somebody to gun violence.
Alixa: And if somebody lost somebody to gun violence who has entered, they can take a note that was written by somebody else. So it's a very interactive piece, and When it showed in L. A., I was there live drawing during the exhibition to also talk about the fact that this is a never ending piece, right, that this isn't just something that happened.
Alixa: It's ongoing and it's getting worse.
Sarah: What does a peaceful exit mean to you and why is it so [00:38:00] important for us to imagine a peaceful exit?
Alixa: Because if we can imagine a peaceful exit, it means our more than human world friends can also imagine a peaceful exit. And it's the way of being in reverence with life, right?
Alixa: Like, I don't think of death so much as a personal thing. I know we all personally die, right? I don't, I don't worry about that too much. Because We all die, everything dies, right? But I do hold very close the proximity with which we are calling and the speed with which we are calling a death of deaths, um, that feels out of harmony.
Alixa: Not just unjust, but out of harmony. And so how do we return to harmony would be a peaceful, peaceful exit for me.[00:39:00]
Sarah: I'm so, so happy that we made this happen.
Alixa: Thank you. Thank you so much.
Sarah: Thank you for listening to Peaceful Exit. I'm your host, Sarah Cavanaugh. You can learn more about this podcast at peacefulexit. net. And you can find me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram at A Peaceful Exit. If you enjoyed this episode, please let us know.
Sarah: You can rate and review this show on Spotify and Apple podcasts. This episode was produced by the amazing team at Larj Media. You can find them at larjmedia. com. The Peaceful Exit team includes my producer, Katy Klein, and editor, Corine Kuehlthau. Our sound engineer is Shawn Simmons, Tina Nole, and I'm. is our senior producer, and Syd Gladu provides additional production and social media support.
Sarah: Special thanks to Ricardo Russell for the original music throughout this podcast. [00:40:00] As always, thanks for listening. I'm Sarah Cavanaugh, and this is Peaceful Exit.