Litourgia (2020) is a collaborative project created by Julio Wagner-Tearney and Jacob Ward. One of the first projects created by the SCARBO artists’ collective, which was founded as a joint venture by students at the University of Michigan to create and promote projects by emerging and underrepresented artists. The collective has since dissolved, but its name continues to evolve into a broader artistic ethos, archive, and storytelling mechanism centered around art and its role in creative protest.
The photo series explores the idea of a liturgy, which is defined as a public, ritualized form of worship usually performed by a religious group. While a liturgy traditionally includes words, actions, and symbols used to offer praise and thanksgiving to the divine, Litourgia questions these themes through the lens of Christianity and its role in the history of the United States.
Litourgia was created in response to the rise of Christian nationalism in the United States during the final years of the first Trump presidency. Set in a historic Roman Catholic church in Detroit, Michigan, this selection of images from Litourgia features the subject in three distinct positions: exhaustion and surrender; rest and discomfort; and reverence. Catholicism itself, as a dominant power structure in the West for millennia, is deeply marred by its role in torture, abuse, and murder carried out in the name of God, as well as by its use as a tool of imperialism to justify the subjugation of non-European peoples—namely Indigenous communities and enslaved Africans—whose traditional practices were deemed demonic and targeted for eradication.
Jacob Ward 