In the latest issue of AnOther Magazine, the Montreal-born performance artist and sculptor recalls a formative pilgrimage to Benin in West Africa
This story is taken from the Spring/Summer 2026 issue of AnOther Magazine:
“When you’re working with the body on an extended timescale, it becomes harder and harder to ignore its own particular poetry. There’s not a lot you can do about the very pronounced physiological impulses that will inevitably make themselves known. Your choice is to make that a part of the work or to fight against it. I believe in those impulses being informed by previous generations, by ancestry. Vodun happens to be a system of beliefs that is in my genetic make-up, my DNA. As I’ve learnt, first in Haiti and now in Benin, where Haiti’s entire system of belief originated, there’s a lot that is parallel to how I move, how I think and feel and exchange energy. It’s in the way that people navigate spaces through very natural and extremely nuanced exchanges with one another – to honour each other, honour themselves and the people who came before them. Watching a lot of the rituals in Benin, the ways in which people move, the way that the audience is implicated energetically in exchanging and holding some kind of pulse – these are all codes that my body, or something of me, remembered through generations, because it’s all very present in how I have been making work.”
Miles Greenberg recently discovered that he has ancestry in West Africa. The Montreal-born performance artist and sculptor, known for physically demanding, breathtakingly lyrical performances typically centred on his own body over hours-long stretches, spent the early days of 2026 in Benin on a research trip and pilgrimage. During his visit, he attended the annual Vodun Days festival in the coastal city of Ouidah – one of the gates of no return during the transatlantic slave trade and the cradle of Vodun. Long sensationalised by the West, this thriving ancestral religion is practised through masked ceremonies, dances and songs that honour the spirits of nature and of the dead. Its extended rituals speak powerfully to the impulses Greenberg is compelled to enact in his own work, which he has staged at the Louvre and during the Venice Biennale – performances through which his body and spirit “will be somehow changed, somehow altered, somehow healed, somehow repaired”.
This story features in the Spring/Summer 2026 issue, marking 25 years of AnOther Magazine, on sale now.
