Political Sorcery creates metaphysical tools for fighting specific evils. In proximity and with the support of others, we 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, but we'll mostly create our own sorceries and perform them together for greater effect. Its meta-message is that there are things beyond the power's understanding and control, that they're not untouchable. If “political” is to affect the power relations, Political Sorcery is a direct way of reclaiming its core. It is art that metaphysically acts on the world – art as political sorcery.
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. No matter how "unscientific" or wacky it sounds, Political Sorcery might be a way to have a saying, an influence, it might be one of the few still possible ways to be political, 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. Political Sorcery is a way of acting at the end of hope.
This is not just a symbolic gesture. Sorcery is a human capacity that we have and there is clear evidence of its workings. There is vast documentation about sorcery capacities in shamans, witches, saints, and people in general. In the "pointing the bone" shamanic practice, people who had been ceremoniously pointed and cursed would go into a rapid decline and no treatment has been shown to prevent their soon to follow death. Puzzling studies show that, mysteriously and scientifically unexplainable, prayer can help in healing even the people that you pray for, no matter the distance. Our default scientism and physicalism-infused perspectives render these things inconceivable. Yet, in all cultures, Western European until recently too, the fact that we can affect events at a distance and be affected was an unquestionable experience. Our bodies were forced out of these capacities to become anatomic, medical, machinic, suitable for industrialization and capitalism. That's why we are still culturally pressed to shy away from these subjects.
Metaphysical practices have their meta-ethics – impersonal, supra-human justice that comes from beyond, above. In many traditions, sorcery only takes hold if it's ethical. For sorcery to be effective it has to serve a greater good. If you try to abuse it for greedy personal gain, it might turn against you. There used to be a metajustice at work and the metaphysical was keeping things in check – you cannot exploit and amass huge wealth if greed is a fundamental sin, or if destroying nature means killing your "mother", or your soul. Capitalism is radically incompatible with these metaethics. To "progress" they needed to get rid of the spiritual. They had to burn the witches so a body as a mechanism, suitable for industrialization, could appear.
If Sorcery is the power to affect and to be affected, interesting art is at least half-sorcery – it appears in a process of being affected, of being sensible to the world. What is not so much believed in our times is that doing art (image, object, text, performance) can directly affect reality, beyond psychologically influencing the viewers. And probably, if we culturally don't believe in this power, it does not happen, or it happens less. Yet, it might work even if you don't believe – Political Sorcery can generate believe and make itself real through practice.
These zones are still tabu in current art, not only as subjects but also at a level of art function, yet, politically, ecologically and maybe also spiritually (to use another tabu word), being in a full mass extinction event and horrible humanitarian crises, we have to explore uncomfortable zones, to open frames, paradigms, the world. It's time to reclaim 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 sorcery possibilities.
Political Sorcery, documentation as text, notes from inside
Political Sorcery 3 – metapolitics
In the frame of Invited Artist, March 30, 16h at Somn
We're
more and more captured in algorithmic vortexes of schematic, polarized
views on reality. From inside a vortex, one is amazed how the enemies
(there are always two sides) can be such idiots, or fascists (now in
Romania each side sees the other as fascist). The antagonistic dynamic
creates frenetic fundamentalisms, people who anxiously defend dogmatic
perspectives, generating anti-thinking, cult-like atmospheres and
oppressive realities. If you dare to propose a different perspective,
you get fiercely attacked, sometimes by both sides. It's a lot of
passion, conflict and drama, but, if you take a bit of distance, it's
difficult to see why. The world is getting only worse, no matter which
vortex tribe wins, because neither of them addresses the real problems,
and no one seems to want to. No side wants degrowth, or to exit the homo
economicus mindset, or to question materialism, progress, the
techno-scientific worldview and other implicit certainties that enable
our ecocides, wars, crises and general decline. Not even an alternative
to oligarchic capitalism seems to be wanted. Nothing political is
proposed, it's mostly tribalism, different types of identity politics
who amplify each other through antagonisms. At every “big change”, after
an election for instance, the system goes on, eventually with a
different vibe of antagonistic ideology in the background. That's why
corporations can actually embrace any of these sides without any
problem. There is an impossibility of politics in both of the important
senses of the word – no real debates between divergent perspectives, and
no attempts to change the real power relations.
In this hopeless atmosphere, Political Sorcery proposes:
-sorcery
in attention – to go from vortex, spectacle attention to aesthetic
attention – from quickly and predictably reading and interpreting news,
facts and images, to an aesthetic sensibility, to a capacity to trace,
embody and feel the movements and the processes behind images, facts and
discourses.
-sorcery in thinking – to introduce nuances,
paradoxes, contradictions and doubts, to complicate things and make
zealotry impossible. To complexify – where there are just 2
perspectives, “good” and “evil”, to propose a 3rd, a 4th… and a way of
simultaneously holding two or more incompatible ones.
-sorcery
in the body – the power to affect and to be affected by (political)
reality, through body practices and sorceries in relation to other
objects, bodies, events.
Political Sorcery 2 – Peace in Palestine, and everywhere
(2024, near the Parliament, Bucharest)
This is not a protest, is direct action. Political Sorcery proposes to come together and activate blessings for the ones that act towards peace and cursings for the ones that act towards wars and genocides, whoever they are. We don't even have to decide who is the most guilty for what's happening, if Israel, Hamas, the US, the military complex or other global capitalist interests are the worst. We might have our strong opinions, but if we really believe them, we will be open to test them. Just come with an intention for peace and for what is necessary for a meta-justice to happen, and let's see what Political Sorcery might do.
📷 Adriana Gheorghe, Petre Fall, Cătălina Gubandru, Eliza Trefas, Florin Flueras.
With Eliza Trefas, Adriana Gheorghe, Cătălina Gubandru, Kira Valentina, lypkhan, Alex Trefas, Petre Fall…
Political Sorcery, notes from inside
Politica Sorcery 1 – green sorcery
(18.09.2023, IOR park Bucharest)
Bucharest is an ecological disaster. Parks, green spaces are filled with concrete, terraces, kiosks, coloured plastics... or they are illegally closed to the public, privatized (arenele BNR, Casa Poporului), or they are turned into parking lots, or they are fraudulently retroceded and the trees are cut down, poisoned, burnt as now in IOR, Grozăvești... Bucharest is a car hell, with the worst traffic in Europe, the few bike lanes are dismantled, the city boils and the air is poisoned by millions of cars and the garbage burned by the waste mafia. In the rest of the country it's much the same, plus the obsession with highways (other environmental disasters), the railways are left in disrepair and the forests are rapidly cleared.
Those who are supposed to do something are corrupt or involved in these disasters. Although it is known where the imported UE waste is burned, everything is allowed to continue. Probably under the influence of the powerful car lobby, all the measures that are taken are for more traffic - widening streets, overpasses, more parking lots, and nothing is being done against traffic and pollution - encouraging public transport and cycling, discouraging the use of cars through legislation and infrastructure - 30 km/h speed limit, cycle lanes, high parking, congestion and pollution charges, boulevards and parking lots turned into gardens. In IOR they are poisoning, cutting and burning trees in an area of 12ha and instead of the fraudulently retroceded land being urgently confiscated and all those involved sent to jail, the authorities ignore or rather pick on the protesters. They changed laws to remove trees and green spaces from protection. Camping has been banned and they also want to ban access to more than half of the forests, to be able to clear them without any friction.
Apparently nothing can be done, all that is left is metaphysical activism and that is what we will do. From the silent media, to the corrupt administration and of course to the real estate sharks will be all subjected to our Civic Sorcery in a similar way in which the trees were subjected to their physical abuse. Civic Sorcery will be centered on the IOR and Bucharest mentioned cases, but will also be extended to other disasters of this type. It's time for them to get afraid.
Political Sorcery, notes from inside
