Hilma’s Ghost’s participation in Circus of Life, the inaugural Counterpublic Convening curated by Laura Raicovich, explored ritual as a form of collective artistic practice and civic imagination. Across the three-day festival, the collective constructed a temporary public altar that functioned as an evolving site of reflection, participation, and exchange. Visitors were invited to write personal petitions—for healing, love, work, justice, spiritual renewal, or other aspirations—and place them within the installation. At the festival’s conclusion, these accumulated offerings were ceremonially burned, transforming individual desires into a shared gesture of release and collective possibility.

Extending the installation, Hilma’s Ghost facilitated a three-hour participatory workshop combining guided meditation, the creation of symbolic spell jars using ritual materials, and a closing communal invocation centered on peace and mutual care. Participants departed with their handmade objects as tangible reminders that transformation is sustained through ongoing intention, embodied practice, and collective responsibility.

The project builds upon a lineage of artists who have understood participation not simply as interaction but as a means of reimagining social relations. Like Lygia Clark’s therapeutic propositions, the work privileged embodied experience and affective exchange over the production of discrete art objects. It also resonates with Joseph Beuys’s conception of social sculpture, in which creativity becomes a civic force capable of shaping the social body, and with Suzanne Lacy’s socially engaged practice, where public participation serves as a vehicle for dialogue, visibility, and collective agency. Rather than producing spectators, Hilma’s Ghost invited participants to become temporary co-authors of a shared ritual.

Situated within broader conversations around socially engaged and relational art, the project also extends beyond the conviviality often associated with Nicolas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics by foregrounding care, vulnerability, and interdependence as political acts. Echoing María Puig de la Bellacasa’s writing on the ethics of care, the altar became a provisional commons where private hopes were transformed into a collective archive of aspiration. Here, ritual operated not as spectacle or an expression of fixed belief, but as a social technology, a framework for gathering, reflection, and mutual recognition. Within Circus of Life, Hilma’s Ghost demonstrated how artistic practice can cultivate forms of civic participation grounded in imagination, solidarity, and shared responsibility, offering a temporary yet meaningful counterpoint to the fragmentation and alienation of contemporary public life.