Icons in Ash, Female Voice Festival will take place on Tuesday, March 7 at 8pm (not as originally planned on International Women’s Day, so that we can do other important things on March 8)

Concert and Spoken Word Performances at

West Park Presbyterian Church
165 W 86th St, NYC (at Amsterdam Ave)

Icons in Ash, Cremation Portraits an exhibition of my work at Ubu Gallery inspired this concert, in which we try to reintegrate life and death: to touch death, work with death, to let it speak in its mundanity, its grandeur, its familiarity and its mystery, its uniqueness and its universality, to redeem it from oblivion, to give it its own life again.

We have isolated or banished death from our lives, we cannot bear to look it in the face, as if we are embarrassed by it, the simple fact of grief makes it obvious that a different relationship is not only possible, but that it is necessary.

We want to celebrate that we are women, that we have been always responsible for dealing with the dying and dead and as Judith Butler observes that the phenomenon of mourning tells us that death is inherently social. If we want to be able to understand and to live with it, we have to reintegrate it into our social being.

And that's the purpose of this concert and of course celebrate my new book Icons in Ash as well