THE GATHERING | Clapback Ceremony
Part of Sacred Grounds: From Soil to Soul—a weeklong experience by Sip & Sonder celebrating coffee, culture, and connection in Mexico City.
The Gathering is the culminating celebration of Sacred Grounds: From Soil to Soul—a communal day of ritual, art, coffee, and connection at Mariane Ibrahim Gallery. Featuring different cultural guides, this closing event invites guests to honor the week’s shared experiences, reflect on ancestral ties, and celebrate the sacred act of coming together over coffee.
A ritual of release and sonic restoration
Once every orbital cycle, a ceremonial emissary from the outer rings of Planet Esoterica arrives to transmute harm into harmony in the Clapback Ceremony for a ritual of release, divination, and sonic restoration, led by multidisciplinary artist, Autumn Breon.
Planet Esoterica is a care-powered, creativity-abundant world located 300 light-years from Planet Earth, where ancestors go to rest and reimagine. It is a place where refusal is a portal, adornment is armor, and joy is treated as sacred infrastructure. Harm is metabolized into power on Planet Esoterica and in this performance ritual, the artist serves as a care-charged envoy tasked with intercepting energetic trespasses and restoring vibrational clarity through spellwork, communion, and rhythm.
Audience members are invited to approach one by one, each carrying a microaggression or uninvited energy. Once spoken aloud to the artist, these harms are transformed. Breon responds with an incantation from Everyday Oracle, a deck designed for moments when refusal is the highest form of care. A ceremonial cup of coffeeis shared between them, sealing the pact of release. Together, they name the harm and transform it. The ceremony features a collective round of rhythmic clapping, live drumming, and call-and-response. The audience joins together in synchronized sound, a portal-opening gesture that reverberates with protection, clarity, and affirmation. The body becomes a site of joy, resistance, and connection.
about autumn breon
Autumn Breon is a multidisciplinary artist who investigates the visual vocabulary of liberation through a queer Black feminist lens. Using performance, sculpture, and public installation, Breon invites audiences to examine intersectional identities and Diasporic memory. Breon imagines her work as immersive invitations for the public to join in the reimagining and creation of systems that make current oppressive systems obsolete. Breon has created commissions for Art Production Fund, Frieze Art Fair, and the ACLU of Southern California. Breon’s performance history includes Hauser & Wirth, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, and the Water Mill Center. She is an alumna of Stanford University where she studied Aeronautics & Astronautics and researched aeronautical astrobiology applications. Breon is a recipient of the Crenshaw Dairy Mart Fellowship for Abolition & the Advancement of the Creative Economy and the Race Forward Fellowship for Housing, Land, and Justice.
about Sacred Grounds: From Soil to Soul
Sacred Grounds: From Soil to Soul is a weeklong pop-up in Mexico City celebrating connection across cultures, ancestry, and the journey of coffee from origin to cup. The activation brings together creative, cultural, and culinary experiences that invite participants to explore ancestral rituals, diasporic storytelling, sensory engagement, and communal gathering—all anchored in our shared humanity and the rituals surrounding coffee. The experience honors the interconnectedness of people, land, and culture, tracing coffee’s path from the soils of Ethiopia and Mexico to the cups we share today.
Visit the link below to learn more and see the full lineup of the week’s experiences.
