“Achter Het Zeil: Fallen Loot, Angel Waking”, from “sex with Buildings”
This photo series project emerges as a companion to my dissertation, “The Undercurrents of Capitalism” where I explore the Hermetic way of knowing in the Amsterdam ritual building, Het Scheepvaarthuis (above). To participate with this monument of global capitalism and take it on its own terms, I initiated myself into its language of symbols.
The development of what I am calling magical photography began with the non/rational dialogue required by Het Scheepvaarthuis. The series is vision-guided; re/animating the still life and including myself as spirit-woman, a “stilled life”-waking, I use intuitively guided, random “stillings” of my own during constant movement to alternate the narrative by nonlinear means. This is a re-worlding through transformative participation with the “other” of global capitalism.
“Participation […] signifie(s) the association between persons and things […] to the point of identity and consubstantiality […] This sense of participation is not merely a representation for it implies a physical and mystical union” (Tambiah 86).
The photo works that follow were conceived out of a vision. This vision emerged during my research-initiation, where, behind the salty breath of history, I witnessed an angel lying, like loot in a Dutch still life. Strewn in seaweed, she had been downed by pirates on the coast of the emerald isle … hauled quietly back to the lowlands. There, among her friends the tulips and the tremolo of the sea, she lie slung, subtle and dreaming.
“Participation is an immediate datum of human consciousness which cannot be reduced to prior reasoning”, it is “spontaneous animism” (Hanegraaff on Levy Bruhl 373-4)
Between a single light source, and the banquet of shadows that followed, the angel woke to tell her story in the motion between them. The photos that follow were taken using a remote controlled device, enabling me to climb onto the table and sink into her form. She shot herself over a series of nights, reliving her fall over and over again. She knelt down, reclined, she ate apples. She was scared and sacred. She laid the corpses of flowers between her legs and was born then, a sphinx. Persecuted, Transformed.
“movement fundamentally disturbs boundaries, complicates and disrupts established relations, multiplies and creates immanent connections, and produces the virtual” (Springgay, Stephanie, https://stephaniespringgay.com/event/242/)
Finally, on the last night, the angel was swallowed. Her light filters out through the gullies of Neptune’s ribs, where I found her, bubbling like champagne.
“the absolute affirmation of good implies an absolute negation of evil: so also in the light, shadow itself is luminous.” (Eliphas Levi 83)
WORKS CITED
Hanegraaff, Wouter. “How Magic Survived the Disenchantment of the World”. Religion, Vol. 33, 2003, pp. 357-380.
Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”. In the Foucault Reader ed. Paul Rabinow. Pantheon, 1984.
Levi, Eliphas. Transcendental Magic, Part One: The Doctrine of Transcendental Magic. Rider & Co, 1896.
Levy Bruhl, Lucien. Carnets. Presses Universitaires de France, 1998 [1949].
Tambiah, Stanley. Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality. Cambridge University Press, 1990.