Natalia Blanch

27 September 2001

Performance at the Atlantic Center for the Arts

Performance on 27 September 2001

With the artistic direction of Paul Miller (aca DJ Spooky), Saul Williams and Carrie Me Weems
Atlantic Center for the Arts (ACA), Florida, USA
→  atlanticcenterforthearts.org

Digital video 2'57'', 2001

For the performance, during fourteen following hours, 11pm to 1pm, I draw with a pin on vellum paper tracing a digital pattern of my voice. During the performance, the resident artists were able to attend and witness the moment, some of them responded to it with poems.

[...] “She has poked
Tiny holes
Through time
And a supposed future
Is escaping
She has transformed
Her prayers
Into pure vibration”

[...] “The day of atonement
Has been erased
From tomorrow’s history
For today
She has poked
Tiny holes
Into the palms of time
And has bled
The sad
From the past”

Saul Williams, 28 September 2001

[...] “She writes a prayer onto her body
In fact her body is a prayer

An act of distilled faith and will in action weathered fair
A fair prayer body in fact which speaks even as we are spoken

Her movements speak in soundlessness
Homeless promises are sifted through her fingers delivered to aching backs in withdrawal

From heaven to her is a local call

Her patience lives as a mothers suckling nipple that starving infants feast on
Witness relentless patterns she punctuates delicately with a pinprick

To protect us from famine

[...]

The meaning of her words oceans depths charged by their terseness

This is how her art gets to know her
Her art as in her heart out on a necklace strung

For she is she and her art getting acquainted
As onto her body lost prayers are painted recited and sung until

Even her smile is an offering to the gods
Like the wind she carries us to ourselves
Because we are made of her

She breathes us in and we are humbled.”

Noël Jones, slam poet