Magda is an artist and scholar whose work focuses on immigration, heritage, and border justice along the
US-Mexico border. Magda learned the process of making prayer ties through her collaborative
ethnographic research with the organizers of the Migrant Trail Walk– a 75-mile walk between Sasabe,
Sonora and Tucson, Arizona that bears witness to the deaths of migrants in the Sonoran Desert. As
meditative objects, prayer ties are created through collective grieving activities and site-specific
encounters that materialize and mobilize cultural repertoires. As Performative Objects, Magda’s Prayer
Ties is animated by intention, medicine, prayer, and other states of presence. Functioning in multiple
ways, Prayer Ties allows us to publicly and privately grieve while also
archiving/recognizing/documenting the deadly impacts of prevention through deterrence policies and
border militarization.