Over the weekend, Lakota artist Marty Two Bulls Jr. led an engagement to cleanse the Sanford Underground Research Facility.
The sprawling underground laboratory was once home to the Homestake Mine in the northern Black Hills, which produced over 40 million ounces of gold.
In 2024, Two Bulls was the Sanford Artist in Residence. He says his time at the facility, and underground, was complicated.
Two Bulls said the underground laboratory is filled with some of the world’s top mind’s studying particle physics in ways that feel like science fiction, but he also saw a different perspective.
“It was also really hard as a Lakota person to see first-hand the amount of—I don’t know how else to put it—the desecration of the mineral extraction over the years," Two Bulls said.
So, Two Bulls decided to 'azilya,' or smudge, the facility through the mine’s air intake system. It’s a traditional practice to cleanse a space of bad spirits or energy.
For months, he gathered donated sage bundles burned near an opening of the Ross Shaft for about an hour.
Two Bulls said the engagement felt like a symbolic act, but that sensors a mile underground detected the smoke as well.
“It blurred the lines, for me as an artist, in a lot of these compartmentalized practices. I don’t feel comfortable saying it was necessarily performance art because it’s more than that. I don’t feel necessarily comfortable saying it was a ceremony because it’s more complicated than that.”
An exhibit of Two Bulls’ work from his time as the artist in residence at SURF, titled 'Inyan Wakan,' is scheduled to open at the APEX gallery at South Dakota Mine on April 4.
To hear SDPB's full interview with Two Bulls, click play below.
