Litourgia (2020) is a collaborative project created by Alec Hirata, Julio Wagner-Tearney, and Jacob Ward as one of the first projects under the SCARBO artists’ collective. 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. Traditionally including 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 first Trump presidency. Set in a historic Roman Catholic church in Detroit, Michigan, this selection of images 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 marred by its role in torture, abuse, and murder carried out in the name of religion, 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.