Ritual Through

In this photographic series, the artist guides us through the various ritual layers she practiced daily while working on a sales line at a call center in 2026. The documentation unfolds from the inside out, following the very order in which these rituals were performed, revealing a meticulous and deeply personal symbolic architecture.

The journey begins in the morning, with a spoonful of honey before leaving, since, selling over the phone, her voice was her most precious tool, and the image of Saint Martin of Tours, patron saint of commerce and sales, kept safe in her purse. On her body, runes were drawn on her skin, linked to abundance, good fortune, and attracting luck. In her underwear, predominantly red or green, she placed a cinnamon stick, lentils, and a scapular tucked into her bra. On her left wrist and right ankle, she wore red bracelets with the evil eye, positioned horizontally to ward it off. In her shoes, seven ten-peso coins. On the desk, a maneki-neko and the same runes she wore on her body, now inscribed on the document where the daily sales were recorded. And to "tie everything together," the artist's mother lit her Easter candle and prayed every morning as she watched her leave. Following the structure that Arnold van Gennep (1909) identified in rites of passage—separation, liminality, and incorporation—this morning routine functions as a daily ritual of transition: separation occurs in the domestic space, where the body is prepared and symbolically charged; liminality inhabits the journey, that threshold between home and work where the transformation is underway; and incorporation is completed upon sitting down at the desk, where the same symbols she wore on her body anchor the ritual to the workspace. What is significant is that this rite of passage is repeated every morning, suggesting that the transformation is never permanent: each day it must be rebuilt.

With this work, the artist portrays the relationship between a profound and everyday spirituality, rooted in amulets, rituals, and divine intercession, and the reality of a highly demanding job. In the words of Michel de Certeau (1980), the call center represents strategy: an institutional system designed to extract productivity from the body and voice. The rituals, on the other hand, operate as tactics, maneuvers through which the artist introduces a completely different, symbolic, and intimate logic within a structure that only recognizes metrics and results. The piece also explores, with lucid irony, the disproportion between the symbolic reach of the deployed ritual apparatus and the scale of its immediate application: rituals historically associated with self-improvement, abundance, and profound transformation of destiny, mobilized to close telephone sales. The artist described it as bringing a bazooka to a paintball war.

When questioned about the effectiveness of her ritual practice, the artist responded with a figure: $756,000 in revenue generated for the company in the last three months.

Bibliography:

De Certeau, M. (1996). The Practice of Everyday Life. Vol. 1: Arts of Doing. Universidad Iberoamericana. (Original work published 1980 as L’invention du quotidien. Vol. 1: Arts de faire. Union Générale d’Éditions.)

Van Gennep, A. (2008). Rites of Passage. Alianza Editorial. (Original work published 1909 as Les rites de passage. Émile Nourry.)