March 2023.
The Prayer, Reanimating the Soil above Death is a 20-minute performance by artist Helen Blejerman, documented by Peter Martin in photographs and video clips.
This work draws from a Oaxacan burial tradition in which, after the wake, an artisan arrives to trace the likeness of the deceased (or a religious image) on the floor with glitter and sand. Here, in the artspace, the portrait becomes a sequence of numbers—each one the age of a woman murdered in Mexico. The ages are taken from official records listing names, occupations, and dates of death. One by one, I poured glitter to form each number. When it was complete, I swept it away, trying to erase it. But, as Ian Frazier writes in Gone to New York, “Glitter, in the house, never leaves.”
The piece lingers in the space between remembrance and disappearance, between the rituals of burial and the violence of femicide.
Helen Blejerman 