The Chapel of Becoming
A new iteration debuts
October 9
The Lab, San Francisco.
The Chapel of Becoming is an ongoing work. Site-specific and adaptive in form, it draws from what is most essential to religious practice, the experience of belonging and spiritual address, and uses that language and architecture to construct something new: a sacred space organized around trans* life itself, unbeholden to any single deity, doctrine, or tradition. The systematic exclusion of transgender individuals from spaces of spiritual life is the condition the Chapel takes as its starting point, a structural wound the work enters from the inside, unbuilding the forms that have produced that exclusion and holding open what the unbuilding reveals.
The Chapel of Becoming is an ongoing, itinerant work by Leila Weefur. Site-specific and adaptive in form, the Chapel shifts in material presentation with each iteration, responding to the architecture, community, and conditions of each new context.
The video documents the original iteration of The Chapel of Becoming, presented as part of Bay Area Now 9 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. That first chapel established the work's central gesture, borrowing the architecture and language of spiritual address to build a sacred space.