Filmed in the striking and historically charged landscape of White Sands National Park, “Movement II (Half Life)” is the second installment in Cassils’s Movements trilogy. It is a cinematic and choreographic performance that explores Trans* embodiment, collective ritual, and the complexities of mourning and continuation. Commissioned for the exhibition Cassils: Movements at SITE Santa Fe, the work engages White Sands as a site of sublime beauty and profound tension. The surrounding environment has been shaped by colonial interventions, from the introduction of invasive species like the African oryx (excluded from the park by protective fencing) to the region’s entrenched military-industrial presence. It also bears witness to deep Indigenous memory, geological transformation, and ecological fragility.

Situated approximately 60 miles from the Trinity Site, White Sands becomes a proximity marked by layered histories. On July 16, 1945, in the Jornada del Muerto desert, the United States conducted the first-ever detonation of a nuclear weapon. This test, known as Trinity, involved a plutonium implosion device and took place about 210 miles south of Los Alamos, where the Manhattan Project had secretly developed both uranium and plutonium-based bombs. The same plutonium design was later used in the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, following the uranium-based bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Often overlooked in national memory, New Mexico was the first place to be bombed. “Movement II (Half Life)” invokes this legacy of nuclear violence and its entanglements with death, colonialism, and environmental collapse. The work reflects on aftermath and decay, tracing how landscapes and bodies absorb, register, and resist the forces that mark them.

The subtitle “Half Life” refers to the scientific concept of radioactive decay—the time it takes for half the atoms in a radioactive substance to disintegrate. It also functions metaphorically, signaling the long timelines of colonial trauma and transphobia, and the enduring effects of exposure, vulnerability, and irreversible change. Working with a multiracial ensemble of Trans* and gender-expansive performers, Cassils crafts a score of breath, stillness, and motion that draws on ritual and resistance. Evoking die-ins staged by ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), “Movement II (Half Life)” becomes a choreography of memory, persistence, and communal rite.

The film speaks directly to the mission of the Feminist Border Arts Film Festival. Cassils’s work centers voices and bodies often excluded from dominant narratives, engaging urgent questions about violence, resistance, and care. It is an affecting collaboration rooted in the material world—not only in the expressive labor of the body but in the very substance of the land. White Sands is not merely a backdrop; it is a participant. The gypsum terrain, the desert wind, the sound of human feet pressing into shifting earth—each element and embodied movement amplifies the work’s sculptural and sensorial intensity.

Cassils is an artist deeply attuned to materiality. In this piece, the site’s ecological precarity and geopolitical resonance shape every frame. The dunes, formed by ancient seas and shifting with the seasons, become a kind of living archive. Even a single grain of gypsum, capable of traveling miles over time, becomes a metaphor for transformation through accumulation—movement that is slow, continuous, and enduring. The 23,000-year-old fossilized Indigenous footprints recently uncovered by drought-driven evaporation remind us that memory is not abstract, but mineral. As the artists write, “the minerals remember.” Cassils’s approach also positions the Trans* body as a medium refracted through silhouettes, drifting camera movement, ambient sound, and abstraction. While the work gestures toward beauty, it also unsettles. Presence becomes not a point of consumption, but a Trans* mode of becoming.

The cyanotype banner featured in the film, originally created during Cassils’s 2021–2022 group performance Human Measure, becomes a visual thread linking bodies, artworks, and shared memory across time. Brought into “Movement II (Half Life),” the banner references and subverts Yves Klein’s Anthropometries, asserting a Trans* aesthetic grounded in agency and ritual. This stands in stark contrast to Klein’s use of women’s bodies as objectified instruments in the production of his work. The cyanotype’s process and color also offer a striking counterpoint to Klein’s International Klein Blue (IKB). While Klein’s synthetic pigment was manufactured and deployed to assert artistic control and branding, the cyanotype is photochemical and responsive to natural light. Its deep blue emerges through exposure and duration, and the resulting human forms evoke the presence of petroglyphs and other ancient Indigenous markings etched into the desert landscapes of New Mexico.

In a time of relentless surveillance and the spectacularization of Trans* lives, “Movement II (Half Life)” navigates visibility without capitulation. It offers a visual politics and poetics of presence, less about display than about being in relation. The work insists on the entanglement of land, body, and history, and dares to imagine that transformation and collectivity remain possible in the half-life of aftermath—through movement of bodies, of resistance, and of political becoming.