Unsorcery

By Florin Flueras and Alina Popa

Unsorcery composes and explores ways of sorcery that can eventually surpass or undo some of the contemporary realities and subjectivities. It is an Artworld involved in a productive alienation from concepts through experience and from experience through thought. Unsorcery is an environment in which Alina Popa and Florin Flueras were working together, each following their own path, doing their own practices, texts and performances around the concepts: Life Programing, Artworlds, Black Hyperbox, Second Body, Dead Thinking, End Dream.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Artworlds
• Release date: Jun 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781393051992

Book preview

Unsorcery story

Florin Flueras

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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 organization 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 would be our umbrella frame under which we would 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