For nearly 40 years, Elia Arce has practiced and performed from the borderline. Arce’s work toes the line between theatre and dance, prose and poetry, ritual and circumstance, nature and consequence. In dissolving these boundaries, Arce courts liminality, sometimes in pursuit of enlightenment, but oftentimes in direct opposition to a singular narrative. Her practice, at its core, is one of emotional atomization; a foray into the sort of radical empathy that transcends the mind and is thus transferred to the body. Arce has been the “crying Buddha” in A Dust of Gold, inviting the audience to whisper their sorrows to her, one by one, and in exchange, she “released” them, sobbing profusely into a wicker basket. She has been papered to the wall of DiverseWorks gallery for The Long Count II, emerging slowly from her canvassed chrysalis over the course of four hours. She has been First Woman on the Moon, exhibiting the broad and varied experience of being “othered.” In one act, she played with a babydoll before dressing it in red and locking it in a cage; in another, she carefully molded a baby out of clay before dropping it unceremoniously. Arce is keen on creating “living monuments,” works that are sculptural in their presence, yet ephemeral in their lifespan. In No Time to Mourn (An Excerpt), the same principles apply, but extend beyond Arce’s vision of the “living monument” and culminate instead in a lifelong effigy.
The first flicker of No Time to Mourn (An Excerpt) arrived in Houston—a scene of which Arce has been a fixture for the past thirty years—as an altar dedicated to the Palestinians killed in Israel’s war on Hamas in the wake of the October 7 attacks. Arce invited Palestinian families living in the city to read the names and ages of loved ones lost to the sanguinary conflict and to lay flowers in their memory. Drawing from funerary traditions in Costa Rica, where an altar made for one individual often evolves into a site of remembrance for the entire community, Arce sought to foster a space of collective grieving.
“In Houston, the artistic community came to support these families, and we were all there to support them,” Arce told Observer when asked about the initial framework of the piece. “We created a safe space … where we could mourn together. Instead of an individual grief, it became a community healing.”
When No Time to Mourn (An Excerpt) arrived as a performance at Los Angeles’ REDCAT contemporary arts center on October 30, 2025; it had already been staged in Houston and New York City. In each city, the performance was slightly different—tailored to suit a particular venue, audience, mood—but the core elements were unaltered. A figure shrouded in blue sits still and statuesque at the utmost corner of the stage. A train from their shroud runs the length of the stage, and a woman toils at its end, turning it over, folding it this way and that, creating a bundle of cloth. She repeats the process so many times that the bundle, once the size of a watermelon, swells to the size of a body. As the woman on stage completes her solemn task and presents the bundle to the figure, arms emerge from the shroud to cradle it. In No Time to Mourn (An Excerpt), Arce is not the protagonist but a narrator, a functional Greek chorus, winnowing across the performance with laments and lullabies.
Before the woman rolls up the shroud, Arce delivers the first stanzas of her Spanish poem “grietas y fisuras,” (“cracks and fissures”) in a sonorous voice. The first couplet reads, “The child finally wakes up / in his father’s arms.” In tandem with the folding ritual, the haunting preface reveals that the boy, who spends the duration of his life as a funeral shroud, is “finally” with his father. Once the bundle has been made and the living Pietà has been realized and carnations have been placed, Arce returns to the stage to offer the final refrain: “Cracks make way for cracks / Cracks fade with the light that makes them obsolete / This is how cracks ensure that in the end, only light remains.”
In the conversation organized by the Getty Research Institute’s Latin American and Latinx Art Initiative and curated by researcher Jasmine Magaña, Arce described the imagery out of Gaza she drew from: mass graves of bodies wrapped in blue tarps outside Al-Shifa hospital and mourning mothers holding their children’s limp bodies. Seeing such images, Arce felt frustrated and helpless. No Time to Mourn (An Excerpt) was created as a negotiation, to massage helplessness into catharsis. To make a monument out of bereavement.
Monuments ostensibly evoke a collective memory, an identity that is both collaborative and inheritable. Every New Yorker who sees the Statue of Liberty and thinks, “I am a New Yorker.” Every Roman who sees the Colosseum and thinks, “I am a Roman.” Arce’s living monuments reject such logic. They correspond to their own culture, they reaffirm their own narrative, they adhere to their own constitution of humanity, incapable of being altered or othered. The enculturation of No Time to Mourn (An Excerpt) rests on a certainty in its own semiotics, a stalwart belief that no matter the audience, grief should be collective, not singular.
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