Praying Star

Single-channel video with sound and live performance, 5'23''

Praying Star centers on Alpheratz, a liminal star suspended between two constellations—officially belonging to Andromeda, yet historically claimed by Pegasus. Neither fully one nor the other, it exists on the threshold: the limen, in Latin. A door between worlds.

The video follows Alpheratz as it moves through states—point, ellipse, division, halo—while a text unfolds on screen tracing the star's resonance with Valentinian Gnosticism, a widespread Christian movement of the 2nd and 3rd centuries. The Valentinians practiced a sacrament called the Bridal Chamber, in which the soul reunites with its divine counterpart and recovers its original wholeness. They also believed in external messengers—activators capable of igniting the dormant divine spark, or pneuma, already present within each person.

Alpheratz is one of these messengers. It prays for us.

At the moment the video reaches its invocation—Alpheratz, pray for us— the artist enters the space and distributes bread inscribed with the word pneuma. Three jars of handmade jam, consecrated under the star's light, rest on an altar before the screen. The audience is invited to eat the word.

The piece proposes that the symbolic and the real are not opposites—and that the body can receive what the mind does not yet understand.