Karen Navarro

Rite of Passage: Liminality, Communitas, and the Politics of Materiality

Karen Navarro’s Rite of Passage operates as a tension between two regimes of meaning: on the one hand, the Turnerian logic of ritual as a liminal space enabling individual and collective transformations—through communitas and anti-structure; on the other, the contemporary material and political conditions, particularly extractivism and institutional frameworks, that contest, co-opt, or fragment those transformative potentials. The installation reimagines the Mapuche Katan Pilun ritual in sculptural and performative terms, translating acts of identity transmission into a sensorial and relational experience that simultaneously interrogates institutional appropriation and extractive capitalism.

Victor Turner conceptualized rites of passage as processes structured around a liminal phase—an interval in which regular social categories are suspended and participants are stripped of their prior status. In this suspension, communitas may emerge: an experience of equality, solidarity, and potential social reconfiguration that challenges established hierarchies. For Turner, liminality is a mode of “anti-structure,” where new identities and relationships can be forged. This framework offers a powerful lens through which to interpret Navarro’s work: as an intentionally designed liminal zone that disrupts institutional norms and gestures toward collective transformation.

The installation itself consists of large-format synthetic hair braids descending from ceiling to floor, forming a quadrangular passageway for the audience to walk through. To enter, visitors must remove their shoes and step onto a bed of stones. This requirement imposes a bodily protocol that is unusual within the museographic context: a gesture of vulnerability and sensory displacement that unsettles the neutrality of the gallery and demands a different corporeal and ethical posture toward the work. Symbolically, this resonates with Turner’s description of liminal rites, in which initiates are stripped of markers of their previous identity in preparation for transformation.

The reference to Katan Pilun—a Mapuche initiation practice marking the incorporation of children into the community—further situates the installation within a ritual framework. Traditionally, this rite involves embodied acts of collective presence, including song, instruments, and the protective circle of kin surrounding the initiate. Navarro translates this structure into sculptural form: the braids that enclose the passage function as an architectural analogue to the community’s embrace. Rather than a mimetic reconstruction, the work becomes a performative reappropriation of ritual practice, activating memory, kinship, and cultural affirmation in the contemporary gallery space.

In many Indigenous traditions across the Americas, braided hair holds dense symbolic value, signifying vitality, continuity, and collective identity. Navarro amplifies this symbolism by transforming hair—real and imagined—into architecture. The synthetic braids become conduits of memory, inviting spectators to inhabit a symbolic embrace of community. Their adornment with silver chollol and blue ribbons intensifies this resonance: silver as ritual ornament and blue as an emblem of water and sky, linking Indigenous identity to the natural world. In this way, hair is rematerialized as both a mnemonic and political device, a vessel of cultural survival and resistance.

The act of removing shoes deepens the critical charge of the work. By obliging this gesture, Navarro introduces a rupture within the museum—a space historically coded as neutral, distanced, and controlling of non-Western knowledges. This subtle yet powerful protocol constitutes a micropractice of decolonization, ritualizing bodily behavior to insist on respect and vulnerability. From a Turnerian perspective, the gallery here becomes a liminal zone: a temporary suspension of ordinary hierarchies where communitas might emerge. Yet, unlike traditional rituals that forge enduring bonds, Navarro’s work occupies the ambivalent terrain of the art institution, where liminal experience risks being aestheticized, neutralized, or commodified. This raises a critical question: to what extent can a ritual re-staged in contemporary art produce transformation beyond the aesthetic encounter?

This ambivalence is heightened by the installation’s material paradox. The bed of stones, purchased from a U.S. company that extracts them in Mexico, introduces the mark of extractivism at the heart of the ritual. These stones embody the economic and environmental processes that dispossess Indigenous territories for global consumption. Their presence underscores a deliberate contradiction: the rite invokes ancestral belonging and connection to the earth, yet the very materials of the installation carry the scars of extractive economies. Rather than undermining the work, this contradiction makes its stakes visible, exposing the limits of artistic practice under global capitalism and compelling reflection on ethics, memory, and material supply chains.

Rite of Passage, then, functions as both ritual and critique. It enacts a liminal threshold where identity, memory, and community converge, while simultaneously foregrounding the contradictions of cultural production in globalized contexts. Navarro’s work offers the possibility of collective embrace and symbolic transformation, but it also insists on confronting the material and political realities that condition that possibility. In this double movement lies its critical force: a reminder that every passage—ritual, artistic, or political—is marked by both renewal and tension.