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  • PARABOLA

    Totem for a upcoming community by Valentina Karga Saunabaari (FI), 2016
  • PARABOLA

    Totem for a upcoming community by Valentina Karga Saunabaari (FI), 2016

    mots-clés

    community, gathering, mythology, totem

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  • VEIL

    Katerina Seda
  • VEIL

    Katerina Seda

    mots-clés

    community, public space, veil, walking

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  • ESVO

    Karen Elaine Spencer dream signs
  • ESVO

    Karen Elaine Spencer dream signs

    mots-clés

    dream, public space, signs, symbol

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  • SIGIL

    Triple enclosure hopscotch and magic square engraved on stone Breassone (IT), n.d.
  • SIGIL

    Triple enclosure hopscotch and magic square engraved on stone Breassone (IT), n.d.

    mots-clés

    engraving, hopscotch, sigil, stones

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  • CARMEN

    Désensorceler la finance
  • CARMEN

    Désensorceler la finance

    mots-clés

    circle, conjuring, finance, fortune-telling, hex, justice

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  • 1. PARABOLA / “Totem for a coming community by Valentina Karga. Saunabaari (FI), 2016”

    Arcana : Le verbe, le mot, la parole — la parabole est liée à la transmission par l'usage de l'oralité. Elle interroge les narrations et les récits, les langages et les mots, le pouvoir de la parole, son potentiel émancipateur en regards d'instances de pouvoir.

    The spoken word, the power of speech and verb — the parable is linked with transmission by the use of orality. It questions narrations and narratives, langages and words, its potentiel for emancipation regarding authorities.

    Card : Totem for an upcoming community, by Valentina Karga // A collective totem based on shared desires arising from a specific community. The totem is a vessel for all the stories, debates and discussions that happened during multiple meetings of the community. It stands as a symbolic object, reminding the community of its intentions regarding the present and a potential shared future.

    The card is in position of resources, forces, advantages sicking the present.

    The card echo the idea of a patrimony, material or immaterial, but also makes us think about idea of folklore as folk refers to a people, and lore, to the transmission of its cultures and practices by the use of the orality.
    Furthermore, the card can raise the idea of déboulonnages, dethrone or destitute a monument of power linked with a specific history to appropriate and empower a community.

    We can read the card regarding our intention that thought to be caring, healing, empowering, as an invitation to create spaces for speech, to cary voices and narratives, materialize links and create a presence that resists to the time, generate a collective identity, a group entity.

    2. VEIL / *Parader voilée des nappes d'une communauté de femmes par Katerina Seda. Nosevice (CZ), 2021

    Arcana : VEIL signifie, le voile, le foulard, l'étoffe, le rideau ou le mât. L'arcane fait référence au drapeau à l'étendard, à la bannière, à l'objet de voilement ou à la parure. L'arcane du VEIL incarne le pouvoir à la fois politique et intime du textile ; elle renvoie à la matérialité d'un monde et hisse son lien avec la terre.

    The scarf, the cloth, the curtain, the sail. Refers to the flag, the standard bearer, the banner, the veiling object or finery. The arcana incarnates the political and intimate power of textile, the materiality of a world and hoist its link to the earth.


    Card : The card depicts Katerina Seda’s performance as part of her work « Talk to the sky 'cause the ground ain't listening" Embroidering veils that acts as a map of the village in which the performance took action / The gap in the middle of the veil is representing a factory complex that split the village, and changed the habits of the inhabitants. Women are walking and talking together around their village, with their veils echoing their traditional clothing.

    *The card « Wandering veiled with tablecloths from a women community », under the arcane of VEIL brings us again to the idea of community. This time the card refers to the clothes, while the last one refers more to the voice and the object. Both evoke the object, or the symbol of identification for a community.

    In position of face to face with PARABOLA, VEIL reveals resistances, pitfalls, adversities but also defenses regarding a situated community.

    *It could be read as an invitation to be careful, to take care of the links that create a community in keeping safe the alterity that composes it. This makes us be careful against universalism maybe, as the will to unify subjective into a same community can be tricky. We understand the two cards as a warning and a tool crossing through the idea of communautarism.

    The defenses also drive us to the porosity and balances between the idea of theatre and ritual, while John Jordan, member of our coven, praised that performance can be interpreted as a non-situated ritual, and that the ritual can be a costumed demonstration. Notably this lead us to what is happening especially in France with the law against separatism, where the government tries to divide people into radical groups ranged by ideologies or by what they look like. The community is criminalized from their belonging postures.

    PARABOLA and VEIL invite us to speak and formulate intentions in a common manner and avoid that the community be deserved by a form of authority beside freedom of thinking and believing.
    Also the women are wandering together, they walk straight and they go on together. The veils that they wear is representing something that what separate them (the industry between their village) becomes the one that gather them ; we can read it as a way to create proper way to auto-assigned our identities, clothes or costumes, proper rituals and proper actions that can generate trouble and confusion into the analyzing and dividing system that sticks to the separatism law.

    « Les rituels font partie de toute culture. Ils sont les événements qui unissent une culture, qui créent un cœur, un centre, pour un peuple. Le rituel est ce qui évoque le Soi profond d’un groupe. Par le rituel à créer un terrain de rencontre où les gens peuvent partager des sentiments profonds, positifs et négatifs –un lieu où ils peuvent chanter et crier, s’extasier ou hurler (un mouvement d’énergie organisé pour accomplir un
    but) ». STARHAWK. Rêver l’obscur. Femmes, magie et politique. Paris : Cambourakis, 2015, p. 234.

    3. ESVO / Abandon d'un rêve-carton dans l'espace public par Karen Elaine Spencer. Montréal (QC), 2017

    Arcana : Esvo du gallo-romain signifie "vagabond", et du latin "exvagus", errer, qui donne rêver, en français.

    ESVO renvoie au rêve, à l'errance tant qu'au vagabondage ou à la sérendipité : circuler, errer sans but. L'arcane fait référence à la mobilité ou à l'exil, à la maraude ou à la vadrouille, à la rôde ou à la dérive, à la trêve ou au répit, forcé ou résigné.
    ESVO signifies vagabond, linked with exvagus, to wander that becomes dream in French.
    Dreaming, roaming, wandering without a specific goal. The arcana refers to mobility or exil, marauding or moping, prowling or drifting, truce or respite, forced or resigned.

    Card : Karen Elaine Spencer // Part of the project "Porteur de rêves", the artist left in the streets stories of dreams that she gathered by occupying the public space, discussing with by passer-by and asking them to tell her a dream. The dream signs, written on cardboard are then left in the public space for future intimal & indirect conversations.

    *ESVO is our third card, in position of potential regarding caring, healing and power. It is the intentions, the faculties, the opportunities and the chances. A movement engaging the body, the body that inhabits space and occupy.
    ESVO figures again the totemic artefact, an object that belongs to immaterial, cultural or cult property.

    *We can read ESVO, referring to vagabondage or to wandering, but also to roundness, the mop, the serendipity. It refers to minorities also, forced into exile, banned from public space and questions the legitimacy of belonging or occupying public spaces: bodies that wander, bodies that display belongings, dispersion or procession (cortege).
    This depicts also maybe the intimacy regarding the public (private is political) where is the border between, the card invites to gather, to make round, to produce the visible to make oneself invisible.
    Furthermore, we can think about desidentification facing over-identification : usurping, craft ruse, escamotage making it look like you're wandering while you're mopin' around. The charge of potential with regard to intention, faculties, opportunities and chances draw a committed movement of the body, inhabiting space regarding a totemic object; Product visible to make yourself unvisible.

    4. SIGIL / *Marelle à triple enceinte et carré magique gravé dans la pierre. Bressanone (IT), n.d.

    Arcana : SIGIL signifie signature, empreinte, cachet ou sceau. Elle est l'idée d'une marque ou d'une trace statuaire. C'est une figure, une écriture, une marque symbolique dont l'inscription a le pouvoir d'authentifier comme de matérialiser un acte, un lieu ou un objet. L'arcane est synonyme de dessin et de dessein : un signe porteur d'une intention, d'une énergie ou d'une volonté qui se dessine et se réalise par l'acte même de son tracé.
    SIGIL signifies signature, mark, cachet or seal. It is the idea of a trademark, or a mark statues. It is a figure, a writing or a symbolic sign, its inscription has the power to certify and materialize an act, a place or a gesture. The sign carry an intention or a will that is drawn and realized when it is traced.

    Card : Triple enclosure hopscotch and magic square engraved on stone // the origin of hopscotches in occident goes back to the 17th and 18th centuries, when hopscotch was played as a court game, synonymous of fortune. The term of ”puck” originally refers to a currency, taking the shape of a token or a stone used for board games. On several fortifications in particular, the symbol of the triple enceinte [triple enclosure] has been found: graffiti hammered or engraved on old buildings and fortifications between the end of the 12th century and the beginning of the 13th century. Its reading deviates according to the studies of documentary traces, but by its trinitarian form the symbol is interpreted to represent the three constituent states of the medieval society and the city of men between Heaven, Purgatory and Earth, which gives its shape to the western diagram of the nine pawn hopscotch game. This type of vernacular inscription is open to various interpretations, generally religious, alchemical, numerological or kabbalistic. They are sometimes linked to the traditions of masonic orders. Their anonymous authors are known to be workers, craftsmen, fortifiers, carpenters, peasants or shepherds, but also pagans and bergers.

    *In position of commitment regarding the intention or caring healing and empowering, it represents vectors, paths, influences and situations, their orientations.
    Un engagement particulier vis à vis de l’intention de prendre soin, représente des vecteurs, des chemins, des influences et des situations en regard, des axes, cartes et identité de racines

    * The card refers to ascension, moving on and up, growing from one side, but symbolizes also to the idea of law and appropriation, makes us question the legitimacy of speech, sermons, fables or narrations giving appearance of truth to ways of existing.

    “Vandalizing is profaning, a term etymologically meaning to put under the gaze, to offer to the sight, to give to see that very thing that escaped the gaze and then the publicity. This is how Solon, the statesman who initiated Athenian democracy, put an end to the esoteric form of laws and political authority by having the laws engraved on tablets displayed on the Agora. The laws appear through the publicity of writing, accessible to all, an invention inseparable from the birth of democracy and reading, to give birth in the West to politics as it should be shared“ STEPHANE AIRAUD & STEPHANIE ELARB, Date limite de consommation, Vitry-Sur-Seine, Ed. Mac Val, 2009


    *We can read the card as an inscription that will challenge the existing order and law, take place as the law, la loi est par essence ésotérique, is fundamentally esoterical and vandalism can be understood as a profane ritual, le vandalisme un rituel profane. Well the card invites us to find spaces for law against trinitarian conception of society ; to create and inscribe through the exercise of our rights, maybe beyond what we can see or intend, peut être au delà d’elle même, ce qu’on peut voir ou au delà de l’entendement. (cf. secular magic / chaos magic nothing is true everything is allowed)

    *Deconsacrating or dethroning a symbolic property or value from a monument in its immaterial form and giving the illusion that its surrounding remains the same, or vice versa.

    «Graffiti brings a certain grace to ugly subways and rigid public monuments - poetic terrorism can also be used in public places: poems scrawled in courthouse washrooms, little fetishes abandoned in parks and restaurants, art photocopies placed under the windshield wipers of parked cars, slogans written in colossal characters stuck on the walls of playgrounds or play- grounds, anonymous letters posted at random or to selected recipients (mail fraud), pirate radio broadcasts, fresh cement... [...] It is not important whether poetic terrorism is aimed at one or several people, whether it is «signed» or anonymous, because if it does not change someone’s life, except that of the artist, he fails.» HAKIM BAY, L'art du chaos. Stratégies du plaisir subversif, Nautilus, 2000, p.17

    "it is generally assumed that these were created during some kind of a ritual and that they have some magical function, to evoke or to ward off something, though no one knows for sure. There is something undeniably magical in painting and drawing or writing. This is why texts and images are surrounded by so many rules and restrictions in our religions but the ability to communicate using signs and images must have been highly magical in the early history of mankind. I presume it was a question of life and death“. ADAMS (dir.), Craig CastelMan, Andreas Berg, Joe Austin, King Size. A project about Tage DIY-Craft & Subcultural Globalization. Stockholm : ADAMS, 2004, pp.133-151

    5. CARMEN / *Rituel de conjuration et de divination par le groupe Désensorceler la finance. Bruxelles (BE), 2019


    Arcana : Carmen symbolise l'incantation, le souffle invocateur du verbe, du chant ou de l'hymne. Elle est l'idée d'un mouvement de l'âme dans l'espace et dans le temps, mouvement porté par un vent d'émancipation. Formulée de manière intentionnelle, l'incantation est la composante orale d'un acte de parole dépassant le seuil de l'entendement. Annoncer, déclarer, déclamer, invoquer, réciter, psalmodier ou chanter, elle peut être une prière, une loi ou un serment ; l'incantation porte en elle le pouvoir d'enchanter : croire et souhaiter très fort pour faire se réaliser le souhait par la parole et la voix.
    Carmen refers to speech, orality, and anthem. It sought the idea of movement from the soul in space and time, a movement carried out by a wind, a breath. Formulated as an intention, the incantation, the spell is the oral element of an act of speech that cross the border or understanding. Annonce, reclaim, declare, invoque, declaim, recite, psalmody or sing, it can be a prior a low or a sermon.

    Card : Désensorceler la finance // A Tarot spread is used between participants of a workshop to discuss fiscal paradises and their influence on the participant's lives. The call of the group is to conjure the harmful entities of those fiscal paradises, as a empowering process to create alternative paradises. Participants are invited to send a "conjuring postcard" to those entities during the next full moon.

    *In position of affects, qualifications, consecrations, the card invites propositions regarding to the intention.
    We can see the table and the chairs, the card also figures a gathering, a meeting and a conversation.

    La table correspond au moment de mettre les choses sur la table, de débattre, de se rencontrer, de mutualiser, de générer, d’invoquer et de conjurer. Somehow the card seems to situate us, which is why we thought that we could find a common incantation for the day of tomorrow.

    Proposed action :

    The idea is that following what we call in tarot readings « adverb cards », cards that will modify, reenforce, or precise the meaning of global spread. You will choose one card, take a screenshot of it, send it in the chat so that the gathering of the different adverb cards generates a first common movement. Regarding your card, you will have the possibility to relate, link what the card makes you feel or think spontaneously.


    We took as a collective trame the idea of anthem and law: music, sound, words, sing, prior, serment. Can be taken from a music, a demonstration song, a replica, a quotation, a reported lullaby, a nursery rhyme, anything that can be voiced, rythmed, and spread. You can diffuse it through 3 different ways: make it loud in public space, share a mp3 sound in discord group and just listen to it at this special time, write it somewhere in the city.


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