Unsorcery story
And photos from Unsorcery Sessions at ARIA, Cuckrarna Ljubljana
At the beginning of 2012, after 3 years of intense activism, of organizing and participating in radical collectives, protests, occupations, political publications I was burned out and hopeless. I felt that everything is lost and "resistance" is futile. There is no way to oppose the oligarchic processes that destroy the world and ourselves, reducing our possibilities of thinking, imagination, sensibility. It seemed that our core was changed, the passion to resist and to dream another reality was deactivated in us – like there were no humans left to oppose these processes. I felt that, if I managed to gather some energy, I better act at these levels where these forces operate, where the current certainties and forms of life are formed, where the subjectivities are produced.
Sorcery was always the last resort for resisting this kind of religious takeover of reality with its total organisation of perceptions, behaviors and affects. Witches were burned for a reason, their type of body and subjectivity were in the way of "progress". As Silvia Federici was saying, a new body as machine was necessary for industrialization to appear and develop: “the human body and not the steam engine, and not even the clock, was the first machine developed by capitalism”. I felt that a new sorcery was needed, one that might break the curse of these pervasive biopolitics. Sorcery that starts "where the hopes end and the remaining options are rather negative, dark and dead". I first called it Biosorcery, exactly with the idea of responding with sorcery to biopower.
At that time I also became skeptical about the "theory wave". I was immersed in what was then the hot Speculative Realism philosophy, but I felt that the theory often becomes conceptual acrobatics, spectacle. I started to see the academic texts as removed from experience, disembodied, and bad writing. I also disliked some of its effects on art – a lot of representation of problems, identities, art that submits to discourse, art under ideology.
In this context, Unsorcery came to be about a productive alienation from concepts through experience and from experience through thought. I noticed that default thought forms can be surpassed through practices, yet practices tend to become routines, routines that can be surpassed through theory. I didn't want to put into practice, to express, embody, perform or exhibit something that I already knew. I was interested in creating a platform for accessing the unknown, or more likely, a bridge through which the unknown can access us.
I was interested in creating concepts as portals towards Unsorcery explorations, ways of opening or creating new doors, conditions for new possibilities of thought and practice. Each Unsorcery concept was a vague intuition in the beginning and an act of faith. In time, thinking and practices coagulate around them, setting in motion certain vectors of intention, orienting practices and acting as attractors to further thoughts, making them more substantial. They opened the possibility for their existence, producing and solidifying themselves through the ideas and practices that they attracted. Unsorcery was auto-creating itself through its practiced concepts.
Love Body (Second Body)
The First Unsorcery concept was Second Body, called Love Body later. One day in 2007, while mopping the floor I felt that by deviating from the usual presence, just by a shift in attention and intention, the ordinary activity radically transformed, as well as the body and reality. I entered a special awareness and sensibility state. I was amazed that states and presences that usually are achieved through somatic or performing practices are accessible just by adding an affective sensibility to everyday behaviors, a different attention. Instead of changing ourselves and developing new practices, we can add another, a second attention to what we already do.
Our default attention creates a body as image, as instrument, and the attitude of control and instrumentalization of the body extends to nature and entire reality. Our bodies are impregnated with a biological conception, there is a scientific knowledge that we put automatically into bodies and objects. We just know that they are made of molecules and atoms not of affects, spirits, or something similar, we actually perfectly know what a body can do and what a body is. The 60s effort of setting free this tool-body was not enough, it ended in emptiness, and depressive, dissatisfying hedonism. The idea of liberating the body fell short. It’s not enough to "free the body", you need to reconstruct the body and that’s a different kind of work.
In 2012, inspired by the body of the ‘internal night’ of Artaud, "the body without organs" of Deleuze, the body as a bundle of affects and capacities of Amazonians, the "dreaming body" of other cultures, I wanted to create a "second body" around a second, affective attention. A body not centered on images but on a special body sensibility that might pull us out of the anatomic body, affecting what is possible to see, think and do – a Second Body as affect, as medium, as a portal towards the unknown.
In June 2012 Alina joined me for an Unsorcery residency and presentation at Teatrul Spălătorie, Chișinău. And since then we have worked together in Unsorcery. We immersed ourselves in Second Body practice and conceptual work around it and we each wrote a text based on it. In her words, Second Body and Unsorcery are "a quest for a body that is not free as in the 1960s, not only deconstructed as in the seminal choreographic work of the 1990s, not only made into a provider of liveness and memory for the visitor to a contemporary art museum in the blooming experience economy of the 2000s."
Dead Thinking
One night in November 2012, on a Warsaw - Berlin night train we had a lively conversation during which we decided that Unsorcery will be our umbrella frame under which we will work long term. We put the bases for Unsorcery as a platform under which we can work indefinitely, not just an artwork that we should complete and present.
We started to work under Dead Thinking concept. We wanted to explore how the event of extinction, the collapse, the death of our world affects us, and what kind of thinking it produces, and what kind of (in)sensibility. Great numbness is needed for our bodies not to be overwhelmed by this event. And this explains a lot of our present global culture. And it seems to be nothing that we can do – our implicit perspectives brought us here and all our solutions are coming from the same forms of thinking and certainties. In Dead Thinking we wanted to see what happens at the edges of our forms of thought and after the death of our ways of thinking. How can we go beyond the implicit certainties, how can we unknow the world?
Intuitively I developed the Fear darkness practice. It amplifies a sensibility for darkness as a mysterious potential that is felt as fear, as a quiver that permeates the body, possessing it, making it unknown. Fear is the substance of darkness and the royal bridge to the unknown. A bridge that we will have to cross rather soon, as society as well. This sensibility is usually avoided to maintain our certainties and forms of thought. I can understand why, a couple of times it happened that we arrived at scary, very strange states and situations. One example:
"August 2012, Saeș. There were no lights in the village, at least where we were. In the backyard the shadows were powerful. They entered my body as fear. Movements in my body amplified all this. I got very afraid. It felt like something very scary was imminent to happen. At some point I accepted the fear as something positive. As some kind of extraordinary power that is in my body and the world. It became pleasant, I felt safe. I was possessed by darkness as a sweet fear. Alina was afraid. She told me to stop. After a while I got scared by her as well, she was also changed by the practice. We saw and felt each other and ourselves as aliens. The entire evening we were in a different state of mind. We were shocked, trying to understand what was happening."
End Dream
In 2014, in a group exhibition at Salonul de Proiecte Bucharest, we did the Unsorcery launch. We created a kind of fair booth with flyers, posters, booklets. We did presentations, lectures, sessions based on Unsorcery practices.
In the same period we started to immerse ourselves in the next concept – End Dream. We approached dreaming as a model for reality. There are interesting similarities between how a world appears in dreaming and how reality appears when we're "awake". As Alina said: "There is only virtual reality" or, as the idealist philosophy is saying, there is only mind, or what religions are saying, there is only God, I then preferred "there is only dreaming". When the dreaming reality and the waking life coincide, the object of dreaming becomes the "reality". In some cultures Dreaming is something at the base of reality and determines what is possible to perceive, think and do – the relative time-space of collective memory that “dreams” all reality. Dreaming can only be sensed and altered through special practices.
The dream is always somebody's dream, like in Amazonian multinaturalism and perspectivism where the world is always somebody's perspective. So we should be careful what are we collectively dreaming, because it seems that we're entering an ugly nightmare. If we cannot change reality, maybe we should dream another one. When the world is a dream, it becomes available to dreaming practices. Or maybe the way to avoid the current nightmare is to wake up. One of the consequences of the fact that you are dreaming is that you can wake up. And when you wake up, you wake up in a superior reality. A hierarchical relation between realities is created through a retroactive degradation of experience – after you wake up you can acknowledge that your previous experience was "just a dream".
I addressed all this in a text called Dreaming the End of Dreaming. Alina wrote Imitation of Dream combining theory, diary notes and poetry. With these texts we abandoned any closeness to the academic style of writing that was until then more or less present in our texts. We started to feel it was very limiting, dry and aesthetically uninteresting.
As practices/works Alina developed All of Nothing (2014) – a paradoxical attempt of producing nothing in the situation of a performance, while live commenting on how this (doesn't) works. This process produces 'something' that has to be continuously negated. "All of Nothing negates that the performance happens where and when it is performed. It lingers in vagueness and dissipation, looking for something that appears in the blind spots of nothing."
Point Pet (2015) was another practice/work developed by Alina in End Dream. This is part of its documentation as prose: "I once took the point on a walk in the forest. It was not a wild forest. It was crossed by a large alley, comfortable to step on even with shoes made for asphalt. I was flying it at a distance not much higher than that of two humans of average height on top of each other. I wanted it to enjoy the perspective of a high branch of a tree, and to look down on me, yes, the abstract always looks down on humans. … Some people have dogs or insects, even rats or piglets. I have a point. It is generic, an abstract pet, a disposition and dislocation, its leash is my consciousness and I groom it with my thoughts. It cannot gain weight but it oscillates qualitatively. It is a superior pet, companionship as alienation. It is the only pet able to accompany humans in the dreamworld."
I developed a practice/work that I called Undreaming: "Undreaming: a capacity of entering and exiting realities by activating different aesthetic sensibilities. Art perspectives are embodied, together with a suspicion of the nature of reality. What we see becomes visual art, what we hear becomes music, our speculative experience of reality becomes conceptual art, what we feel becomes affect art, what we do becomes performance. If, as in many cultures, dreaming is what makes a world appear (the simulational capacity of consciousness in the West), Undreaming can be what makes a reality dissipate into another, through the process of waking up, maybe in a performance, maybe repeatedly. More than being about an aspect of reality, Undreaming is about the capacity of entering and exiting realities by activating different aesthetic sensibilities."
Black Hyperbox
The next concept, Black Hyperbox, is an extension of Unsorcery process to a collective. Collaboration can mean a lot of negotiating, compromises that often lead to the lowest common denominator. In Black Hyperbox we wanted to extend to a collectivity our way of beyond consensus cooperation. "The necessity of a common agreement and common product, which are somehow implicit in collaborations are replaced with productive alienation – each artist is amplified in their direction, following their path in the proximity and with the support of the others." This produces unpredictable interactions between the many processes that are meeting in the same space and time.
We were looking for alternatives to the increasingly corporate style of working on "projects", and to the competitiveness in the artworld. We used our production money from Schloss Solitude Stuttgart and CNDB Bucharest to invite other artists and to work together based on the Unsorcery dynamic of productive alienation from concepts through experience and from experience through thinking. The result was a series of practices and performances that we presented together or separately, and texts that we collected in the Black Hyperbox book.
Alina wrote X Horizon: The Black Box and The Amazonian Forest. She is proposing a meeting, and sometimes overlapping, between two radically different spatiotemporalities, the black box of the theater and the Amazonian Forest, through the bodies of the shaman, the performer and the jaguar. My Black Box text is about how to activate and then avoid being trapped in black boxes. Black boxes are zones of unknown that are required for any openings in reality, for any real transformations. They happen at the end of imagination when you reach the end of possibilities. They're explanatory voids that force thinking and explorations into unknown, jumps between realities, extraordinary occurrences become possible.
In Black Hyperbox I produced Unexperiences practice/work. "Unexperiences are activated by performers who shift their attitudes and moods, embodying and slightly distorting suspicion, awe, confusion, pensiveness, sadness, boredom, joy, alienation, satisfaction, dissatisfaction, hypersensitivity... Sometimes their hyper-embodied and, at the same time, abstract reactions seem to be related to the space, other people, objects, or shared expectations and conventions. Unexperiences are inserted in 'inappropriate' contexts where something else is already happening, adding an extra layer to their ordinary function (art spaces, supermarkets, airports…). Meetings are produced between two types of audiences, attention, situations, performers. Unexperiences are deviations from the pre-packaged affectivity. Artworks are usually visual, sound or conceptual, Unexperiences is affect based."
Alina developed her You Are work. Towards the end of our Black Hyperbox process, she was diagnosed with a horrible illness. She oriented her practice towards therapy. In You Are "the white cube is transformed into a therapy room, a lecture hall, a social form, a space where contemplation meets abstraction and therapeutic touch meets conceptual distance. The visitor-performer is (a) patient and can be activated by the therapeutic touch of the audience. Stillness and affect wake up to movement and language, or not. The audience can precipitate either thought or contemplation, they can trigger perspectives or they can have their own. The therapy is collective and abstraction is both a matter of content and mood. The rest is still."
Artworlds
The art world has its implicit parameters that orient the behaviors, acting as a loose and transparent frame for what is possible to perceive, imagine, think, and do – for what is in and what is out. Freedom, autonomy, creativity, richness of art practices happen inside some implicit frames and mindsets that artists and curators interiorize. Depending on where you are in the artworld, you are under commercial, ideological, or entertainment imperatives. They overlap but usually one of them dominates. In galleries and art fairs is the commercial one, in performance and dance it's the entertainment one, in most biennales and publicly financed venues the ideologic one.
With Unsorcery we became alienated in the artworld, outsiders. People who were supporting us became distant, some accusing us that we went from being political to metaphysical (something very bad). We realized that Unsorcery, or Black Hyperbox are very far away from what can be called object or performance based artworks, they don't fit in. We started to call what we were doing as Artworlds. "Artworlds are establishing as artworks not only products but production, research, curating, art making, forms of living. They don't have a sharp and clear presence, they can be presented as events, as products, as performances, as concepts, as practices, as processes, as artistic identities. Their esthetic effects are somehow always beyond their appearances. They can take different forms in different contexts and still maintain their internal chaotic coherence of a world. They are artworks as artworlds."
In my text Esthetic Entities, Artworlds I addressed these sorts of artworks as artworlds as a wider artistic phenomenon that was developing in Bucharest in the decade 2005-2015. I pointed out some common aspects of these esthetic entities. They have a sort of agency – after a while, it's not only that artists work and develop the entities, but more and more the entities shape and work upon their artists. Artists usually, more or less consciously, adjust their attitudes and behaviors to implicit art world demands, performing in the sphere of success' requirements. The entities often push their artists toward "unsuccessful" attitudes and behaviors. The esthetic entities can function as exit devices from the particular type of subjectivity encouraged by the art environments, and maybe even from the usual production of subjectivity in the society.
Alina's text Artworld and the Artworld ends with this: "Artworlds are relations between people, concepts, practices, and intervene in the practice of society and not only in the discourse about it. And since real society is unrepresentable, since a real community is the one that welcomes its outside, these structures are on the move. They are running from their propensity for closure and stability and oversaturation with identity. The artworks as artworlds are producing what Luhmann called 'world-contingency', systemically: "since they actually exist and can be convincingly experienced as such (if they can!), then something must be wrong with the world.' Perhaps you already know them without having heard their names."
The last Artworld that we initiated was Clinica. "Six artists met in a Transylvanian village in the summer of 2018 to develop therapies that can function also as artworks. The participants were patients, healers and artists at the same time, developing their artwork/therapy and approach to the body and healing. A decisive factor in its initiation was Alina Popa’s hopeless chronic disease. Clinica is not so much about art being therapy, art therapy, but more about therapies becoming art. Contexts that don't belong together are overlapped – the art space becomes a clinic where esthetic healing and performative therapies can happen. Clinica reconnects art and healing, which was the case for most of our history."
Life Programing was supposed to be the next Unsorcery concept. We wanted to radicalize the experimentation with forms of life. To do a form of skete, a retreat in a forest where each of us creates our forms of life. The name alludes also to "live programming" in museums, which was trending then. Because of Alina's worsening condition and death, Life Programing took part only as fiction in my Life Programing text, which is also loosely inspired by discussions and interactions in our Clinica residency.
In her text Art after Cantemir, Alina exemplifies the importance of forms of life, how the philosophies are deeply linked with the life of its authors, through Kant and Cantemir (Romanian philosopher 1673–1723). "We can look at the content of a philosopher’s work in conjunction with her biography, her life-form. It is mainly this form that shapes the trajectory of thought. There is always a meta-history, a particular structure of consciousness that has driven minds into certain philosophical systems or even against systematicity. The environment is perhaps the main force bending thinking and behavior in different directions, as Viveiros de Castro put it at a philosophy conference in Paris, 'thinking in Rio is not the same as thinking in Paris'. … We need to understand that Kant slept very little, thought prayer was useless, was certain that there are planets in the universe inhabited by fully rational beings, and would sometimes stamp his feet to better ground himself. Cantemir composed music, prayed, had visions, out-of-body experiences, dreamed of God, and cried, melodramatically lamenting his human limitation in providing knowledge with an accurate image of the Absolute."
Unsorcery as background
After Alina's death I didn't feel like continuing Unsorcery. Yet it remained as a background for what I'm doing. I continued the "un" series, after Unsorcery, Undreaming, Unexperiences, I worked on Unimages, Unhere. The affective sensibility activated in Second Body continues to be central in my work, especially in Love. "'Love' explores practices for embodying love – hypersensitivity, ecstatic affects, overwhelming feelings, subtle affective connections with things around… Love dissolves control by activating the other way, from the affect body to the mind. From "image body" to body as affects, body as medium, body as a portal towards the unknown, to 'love body'." The same as in Unexperiences, the sensible love bodies in Love, the unreadable bodies in Unimages, the Unhere bodies are inserted in "inappropriate" contexts where something else is already happening – from art spaces to supermarkets and anything in between – adding an extra layer to their ordinary function. Sometimes they appear uninvited in important art events - Unofficial Unworks.
I continued the method format in Artwork. "Artwork is a method that borrows from somatic, spiritual, therapeutic techniques and aesthetics but it is centered on transforming artworks into practices. Central to Artwork is the idea that artworks should be practiced, that art shouldn't just be seen, it should be lived. Why all the effort to create artworks just to be finished in products to be consumed? Artwork is ambiguous, it can appear as performance, therapy, exhibition, workshop, promotional event, text, artwork or a combination of these, depending on the context – art, philosophy, spirituality, therapy, education, alternative medicine, literature. Artwork is the meeting of these publics, conventions and perspectives around artworks as practices." And like in Unsorcery, there are Artwork texts, mostly written from inside the embodied artworks, and there will be a book.
Recently I reconnected with the idea of sorcery in Civic Sorcery – Metaphysical Activism. "When politics are spectacle, when protests and other ways of 'resisting' feel pointless, when it seems that they won and there is nothing we can do, maybe we can act from the other end of reality, on the metaphysical plane. Civic Sorcery is a way of acting at the end of hope. No matter how 'unscientific' or wacky it sounds, it might be a way for us to have a saying, an influence, it might be the only way left to reclaim politics, with a twist. They think that we're powerless, and we might be in the sphere they function and understand. Yet we're having power, and it's time to put it to good use. Civic Sorcery proposes to develop metaphysical tools to fight specific evils. In proximity and with the support of others, each of us will develop charms, rituals, prayers, curses and other metaphysical ways to affect reality through our bodies, drawings, objects, chants, words. We can draw from different cultures, from Christian orthodox special prayers and charms to Voodoo or Transilvanian witches' practices, but we'll mostly create our own sorceries and perform them all together for a greater effect. Civic Sorcery is art that metaphysically acts on the world – art as sorcery. … Our default scientism and physicalism infused perspectives render these things inconceivable. Yet, in all cultures, West European included until recently, the fact that the body can affect events at a distance and to be affected was an unquestionable experience. Our bodies were forced out of these capacities to become machinic, suitable for industrialization and capitalism. … It's time to reclaim back metaphysical capacities and put them to good use. We don't know what a body can do when it stops being an empty anatomical mechanism, especially if it starts to believe in its possibilities."
Based on a lecture at ARIA Ljubljana