Farewell Rituals, is a series of performances art pieces that will take place from June 14 to 18, 2025, in the Netherlands. It will be presented in different episodes and formats: beginning with a performance at the Houtfestival, continuing with a Teken Or Leave It workshop at Nieuwe Vide with performance at the end of the night ( (register via Eventbrite)., and concluding with a video performance made in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Utrecht.
The piece explores the creation of new rituals through performance art, addressing mourning without farewell and its impact on individual and collective memory. It coincides with the commemoration of 80 years of freedom in the Netherlands, linking the absence of farewell rituals to the history of a nation that has also faced significant losses.
About Javi Henríquez (1997) (she/they). Is an actress and performance artist. They started her career in theater but shifted towards performance art in 2019, creating activist works individually and collaboratively. Her work explores lesbian identity and territorial memory through action art, like in the series “Reflections on a Body on the Tightrope” (2022), addressing five cases of lesbicide in Chile. Currently they are preparing for their first international group exhibition at Projektraum Bardo, Berlin (June 2025) with Torta, a piece exploring language and queer identity.
“The idea of this project started from my own personal experience, when my two grandmother and a cousin passed away, in a period of time that the distance and social situations prevented me from attending the wakes, is here where I reflect about the necessity of rituals to mourning and closure, and I wonder how the lack of this can affect not only personal but collectively a community that is affected from a great loss and death.”
Farewell Rituals
Saying goodbye to our dead is an essential rite to heal the wound of absence. However, distance, time, or circumstances can make it impossible, leaving a shared silent pain. “Farewell Rituals” emerges from this impossibility, proposing performance as a space to reinvent farewell gestures, transforming absence into action to honor those who are gone.
Through three formats — live performance, workshop, and video performance — the piece explores the power of performance art to generate new rituals when traditional ones are denied. Mourning manifests through body, voice, and object, inviting reflection on memory and loss.
The piece also dialogues with ritual practices from different cultures, integrating Latin American symbols and traditions to reframe them in a new context. Thus, “Farewell Rituals” proposes art as a bridge between the personal and the collective, the intimate and the historical, the ephemeral and the documented.
#1 Performance at Houtnacht (Slachthuis)
(20:00 -23:00)
The first action of the series “Farewell Rituals” will take place on June 14, 2025 at Houtnacht in Slachthuis.
The performance consists in the creation and building up of the object that will accompany the artist during her journey of exploration around mourning and grieving through the Netherlands. This first action will take place during the night, with the first full ritual from the creation to the burning, ending with the symbolic and physical death of the chosen element by the artist that represents her loved ones that are no longer with her.
#2 Performance during Houtfestival
(whole day)
The second action of the series will take place on June 15, 2025, at the Hout Festival.
The performance will consist in pray the Rosary for 5 minutes in Spanish, facing a floral wreath, with a video of the same action in loop, the combination of the sound from the video and the spoken word from the performer, will create an immersive and almost indistinguishable noise, who, despite potential language barriers, will connect through sound and cadence.
At the end of the prayer, the performer will tie the first ribbon onto the flower wreath, marking the beginning of the ritual journey.
The artist will stay in the stand/podium of Nieuwe Vide, during the festival and repeat the action a few times during the whole festival. When the artist is not performing, it will be talking, inviting and discussing with the visitors about the art piece, the meaning of mourning, death and rituals. How the collective rituals can affect personal experiences and vice versa.
#3 Teken or leave it: Farewell Rituals – a performative workshop – (Register via Eventbrite).
In this workshop we will explore the concept of ritual and performance art, inviting the participants of Teken Or Leave It to reflect on personal and collective experiences of farewell or absence, blending writing, drawing, and discussion about mourning rituals, the differences and similarities of rites from different cultures, to understand new symbolic acts through performance. Culminating with the participation of a collective performance where the artist will lead an experience acknowledging humanity’s intrinsic need for meaning in the face of loss. While traditional rites help humans cope with life transitions, performance art can invent new rituals addressing contemporary social needs workshop at Nieuwe Vide, blending writing, drawing, and discussion about mourning rituals, followed by participants tying white ribbons with names to the flower wreath culminating with the burning of the flower wreath.
June 14 – #1 Performance during Houtnacht
(20:00 – 23:00)
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June 15 – #2 Performance during Houtfestival
(all day)
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June 18 – #3 TTeken Or Leave It
Registration via Eventbrite
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Illustration: Leonardo Vela