The Unburden Project is a collaborative, somatic poetry project that debuted as part of An Aberrational Poetics: Inside Me an Island Shaped (W)hole at 'Ae Kai: A Culture Lab on Convergence, presented by The Smithsonian Institute's Asian Pacific Arts Center on July 7, 2017. One of 8 interactive, somatic poetry installations, “Unburden” asked participants to think about human relationships with living plants, specifically edible plants commonly grown in backyard gardens. Participants were asked to unburden themselves of a secret they have been keeping that continues to affect them in negative ways. Rather than tell their secret to another person, they wrote the secret on a slip of rice paper and added the paper to a bucket of organic soil. The artists then composted the bucket of secrets in collaboration with a local, organic farm, where the process of decomposition added to and enriched the soil content. Seedlings were then planted in the compost mixture, thereby continuing the process of growth and release.

The ongoing iterations of The Unburden Project investigate how we can connect with and be healed by the earth, the water, the sky, and growing things, through indigenous knowledge, intuition, and creative practice.  

The Unburden Project has exhibited at SOMarts for Urban X Indigenous: Unite the Tribes (San Francisco), University of Arizona for Thinking Its Presence Literary Conference (Tucson), CU Boulder, and various colleges, universities, and bookstores in California and the Pacific Northwest.