THE GLOSSARY OF MAGICAL PRACTICES, PLACES, AND CREATURES FROM SANTARCANGELO FESTIVAL, EDITIONS 2017-2019 as curated by Lisa Gilardino and Eva Neklyaeva (revealed full for the first time ever)
Astrology. Official festival astrologer Rosanna Bianchini has created the astral plan of the Festival that was presented during the press conference in 2018. The first day of the first edition in 1971 was considered the birthday, and judging from the position of the planets on that day, apparently Santarcangelo festival is a stubborn Capricorn who never gives up and will have a very long life. The same year we suggested in the catalogue performances suitable for each zodiac sign.
Demons. Or when you learn that the concert of Phurpa, a Russian music collective who explores and develops shamanic and tantric music, was interrupted because apparently the musicians had been fighting for the whole concert with a demon, and the demon won (the resistance from the band notwithstanding). You find yourself asking the artists who are packing the instruments: “But is there something we can do, technically?”
Fantastic Creatures. Each of the festival editions was accompanied by a magical creature. These spirits offered powerful symbols, connected to conceptual corner-stones, art projects, energetic moods, or the rhythm we chose. We love to think of them as the Merman, the Unicorn, and the Dragon. We opened in 2017 with Merman Blix appearing in the fountain of the main square, while a year later choreographer Chiara Bersani premiered a piece where she appears as a gentle unicorn, and we ended with sea dragons in a trans-disciplinary work by Pablo Esbert Lilienfeld and Federico Strate, presented in a local swimming pool.
Food. Breaking bread and sharing delicious food together with all the festival community, sitting along the long tables, meeting the team over lunch, or mixing artists and audiences in the festival cantine on the main square at dinner time, understanding food as energy and ritual — all this had a strong impact in terms of creating the magical atmosphere of the festival.
Imbosco. The late night program of Santarcangelo Festival is the place to go when the night falls. Even if you don’t know exactly where it is, you follow the flow of people walking towards the woods and find yourself in a hidden meadow in front of a beautiful circus tent, lost among the trees, that looks like a shining white and red lollipop. The image comes from a fairy tale and the atmosphere is absolutely magical. Here, every night during the festival, DJs play music from midnight to dawn. And people dance all night long as a ritual that closes one day and starts the following one.
Intuition. We often speak or hear about intuition as a source of inspiration and knowledge, as a precious tool in the curating practice, and more generally in life. But what about using divination practices as well?
Moon Cycle. In scheduling the late night program, moon cycle was taken into consideration.
Palmistry. You find yourself in front of a nun’s convent, and when the doors open, a child appears, and with an air of wisdom that only children can have when they stand in their power and carry their own agency, takes your hand to guide you in. It is an unusual situation, to surrender to a silent young stranger this way. You feel the power shifting. You, as an adult, are not allowed to speak, but you listen intently, as your child oracle lowers the visor of her mirror helmet and starts to speak, evoking three guide spirits into the conversation, into the performance, into the space. What happens next we don’t want to reveal, in case you ever have the chance to experience SPARKS by Francesca Grilli, a project we commissioned for the 2019 festival edition, that engaged a community of local children who have studied palmistry and divination together with the artist. It is only one of the examples of how magic has entered our curatorial and artistic practice.
Signs/Divination Practices. These were powerful tools to connect to our creative energy and to follow our visions, including the less visible ones, to deal with our fears and failures, to empower our antennas, to develop and trust our intuition. Can we be taken seriously admitting that sometimes we made decisions inspired by what we read as SIGNS?
Tarot. Once a year, Francesca Grilli, one of the associate artists of the festival, did a tarot reading for the strategic planning of the next year, giving very practical suggestions, such as where to pay more attention, possible difficulties, tricky situations, ways to approach the project. Sometimes it was truly helpful, sometimes rather funny, and once definitely scary.
Tourmaline. A gemstone with protective qualities, it was really funny to wear for a few days but felt a bit ridiculous. This was a suggestion by Lalla, a witch we visited in a small village — what happened there will stay there. It is enough to say that she is not the type of person whose suggestions you would disobey. So, tourmaline mood on.
Water. A powerful element on many levels with a strong symbolic power, connected to life and transformation. Santarcangelo is surrounded by a river and small lakes and is very near to the sea. Water was always very present at the Festival. From offering free drinking water to the audience in order to reduce plastic and help everybody deal with the hot Italian summer, to staging shows in swimming pools, on the beach and fountains — the body of the Festival was made of water, as were the bodies of the audience.
Witches. We visited a few and took inspiration from others. As Amanda Yates Garcia, who works as a witch in LA, says in her book Initiated, “The fact that magic connects people to their power is the main reason most systems of oppression attempt to ban it.” We wanted the festival to be free, feminist, decolonised, and much more. Definitely magic had a big part in it.
To an Imagined Theatre by Lisa Gilardino and Eva Neklyaeva, or their revelations in “the Glossary of Magical Practices, Places, and Creatures,” a mirror:
Carol Rama, anti-fascist theatre
“In my dream world, in my world of play, there’s always an animal. It’s a fantasy animal, and loving: when I was little […] grass snakes were objects of desire for me, and I put one in my drawings…. I’ve always loved objects and situations that were rejected. When I was about six I used to sleep with a frog that clung on to me. When my uncle explained to me that it clung on because it was a cold-blooded animal, I cried all day long because I thought it was an amorous relationship.” [1]
Carol Rama (1918–2015) was a self-developed artist who lived her life in Turin, a city well known for its witches. Rumors of magical triangles and covert pentagrams appear in its travel guidebooks. Rituals and magic are considered everyday, perhaps circling or emanating from a drain in the center of town. Black voids and impure holes appear in her collage works, staring back with disembodied eyes. The autonomy of her world — incarnated by her studio that, like a portal, opened an inter-dimensional fold and granted access to the immensity of her two-dimensional imaginary — brings into being the fundamental structure of her unmeasurable powers, her uncontainable obsessions.
Her earliest representational watercolor works began in the late 1930s and debuted in a moment when fascism was spreading throughout Europe, although Mussolini had been in power in Italy for decades prior. Rama’s first exhibition was quickly censored as obscene in 1945, curtailing her pursuit of figurative painting. For Rama, figuration consisted of many watercolor paintings populated by prosthetic-like body parts, stylish shoes, missing limbs, outstretched tongues, animated stoles, floral/laurel auras, razors, shit, fake teeth, wheelchairs, make-up, flaccid penises, snakes and eels protruding mainly from vaginas, psychiatric hospital restraints, group masturbation, etc. Rama’s work of this period is frequently described as delinquent,
Charlotte Salomon, “Life? or Theatre?”
Made between 1941 and 1942 while hiding in France, Charlotte Salomon’s suite of 784 diaristic gouache paintings with transparent text, dialogue, and musical overlays — an operatic drama based on Charlotte Salomon’s life overrun with familial abuse and suicide — also disappeared for two decades following Salomon’s death at the age of 26 in Auschwitz. In her book Charlotte Salomon and the Theatre of Memory, Griselda Pollock describes “narration as a political act,” stating that: “Leben? oder Theater? in the form it takes as a painting — spatialization and visualization — performs narration visually (and is not just a narrative)…. There is a relay between the profound undoneness of a subjective namelessness experienced by the artist who undertook her artworking to find a name by telling stories and what I am identifying as the theatre of memory that was produced to do this very thing. The work was invented to enact such a theatre of memory that would play out before the subject whom its creator might become through its making in the imagined presence of others.”[2]
Reza Abdoh, giving birth
In his spoken introduction to the Museum of Modern Art, New York screening of film and video works by Reza Abdoh, Ron Athey condensed his remarks to a contextual description of the Los Angeles club scene in which the two artists overlapped and of the scene of cosmic rage and prolific death from which Abdoh’s work emerged. Elsewhere, as described by writer James Hannaham, Abdoh “blazed through the performance world like a comet — his career was brief, bright, mysterious, and intense. The theatre director’s major works — with his company, Dar A Luz — all appeared between 1990 and 1995, when Abdoh died of AIDS.” Hannaham goes on to describe the “theatre director/ringmaster/auteur’s” work as characterized by “actors attacking scripts that dealt audaciously, even pornographically, with vital issues like racism, homophobia, and AIDS… [with] a relentless feverishness and physical risk onstage that was often frightening….”[3] I think Athey used the word “shouting,” as if to emphasize the sheer appropriateness of urgency expressed by Abdoh’s high volumes and intensities. The film and video works Abdoh unleashed made total sense in that world — something that historicization of his work, and of others of this generation, has perhaps forgotten.
Constantina Zavitsanos, “you and me and astrology”
“…that this world has things that double not halve, that the cut is such a smooth criminal, that love’s holographic, that touch is impossible but we do it anyway, that a bunch of things operate at our incapacity beyond translation, that capacity is so overrated, that desire is abundant — that desire is abundance, sharing doubles, that some things get bigger the more you take away like holes, debt, dependency…” [4]
Using access as a primary material, Constantina Zavitsanos’ exhibition L&D Motel featured an installation of infrasonic sound built into the architecture of the gallery, alongside open captions and a series of transmission holograms. Based on a score that was experienced inaudibly (through the vibrations of a ramp and video projection of open captions), L&D Motel leveled abilities to make a theatre of abundance. Zavitsanos spent a month in residence in the space leading up to it, making work but also in conversation about modes of working, temporality, bureaucracy, as well as unstructured time as a form of attending. It closed with an installment of Constantine and Tourmaline’s Weekly Weather astrological forecast, consulting the stars, together.
How to make abundant theatre, narrate politics, shout history? Maybe we should ask the witches.
[1] Carol Rama, cited in a wall label in Antibodies, curated by Helga Christoffersen and Massimiliano Gioni, New Museum, NY, 2017.
[2] Griselda Pollock, “Introduction,” Charlotte Salomon and the Theatre of Memory, Yale University Press, 2008.
[3] James Hannaham, “Reza Abdoh,” 4Columns, June 29, 2018.
[4] Constantina Zavitsanos, L&D Motel, 2019, project notes.