Heroin, 2018, was a performance that took place in a classroom in New York City, during the context of a final anthropology project. The students and professor were gathered around a large table to discuss their final papers. A plastic take-out container in which grass had been re-planted from the street, and had grown and died and dried, was taken out of brown paper bag and placed onto the center of the table. Among the small patch of dead-yellow grass was a used needle that had been on the ground outside of my house in West Virginia for months, capped and tailed in fluorescent hazard-container orange. A green bottle of Fiuggi water, the label of which claims to have cured both Pope Bonafacio VIII and Michelangelo of kidney stones, was taken out of the bag. I zipped my blaze-orange hunter's hoodie, pulled the hood on, and stepped up onto the table. My body took the space between the table and the ceiling. I looked at the needle and grass. Paced around it. Considering it, as I had while it was outside my house for so long. Slowly, I poured the liter of water on the needle and the grass. It ran through a hole in the bottom of the container, through a join in the table, and onto the floor. I sat down.
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