Symposium Program: #3 Neo-Pharmacopoeia & The Magical Body

The 2nd Symposium on Spiritual Technologies explores the history of witchcraft in Norway and Europe and the capitalization of health in the Middle Ages as well as its repercussions today. The symposium is curated by Invisibledrum Art Platform, an artistic research collective investigating holistic practices and spiritual technologies within the field of arts and new ecologies, founded by Amalia Fonfara and Nazaré Soares. All events are organized with Invisibledrum Art Platform in collaboration with Kunsthall Trondheim and the Norwegian Historical Association (HIFO).

Witchcraft in early modern Europe was found within the domains of the household and health. The persecution of these activities aimed at controlling beliefs and old spiritual traditions as well as folk medicine and healing. Witchcraft is the practice of magical skills, spells, and herbal abilities that comes out of a living and embodied relationship with energy and matter. This entails the knowledge and skills of communing with plant beings as real living entities. In the midst of a global health crisis, we ask what are the points of convergence between the witchcraft trials in the Middle Ages and today? How can we re-imagine contemporary pharmacopoeias?​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​
Click here for your free ticket to join the Lecture Performance and Lecture at Kunsthall Trondheim.​​

Click here to register for Z​oom / remote attendance ONLINE

This program is followed by an informal dinner for those who wish to join us.

The Witch Trials Project

Invisibledrum: Amalia Fonfara, Aleksandre Smakosz, Marita Isobel Solberg, Nazaré Soares, and Jessica Ullevålseter

Lecture performance and group discussion
Duration: 50 mins
Place: Kunsthall Trondheim and online

This lecture performance by the artists affiliated with Invisibledrum and with the Witch Trials Project proposes art practices to reactivate the essential teachings of plants and folk medicine in an urban contemporary context. The intellectual incantation accentuates the power of oral knowledge, explores constellation work for healing trauma, and reconnects to akashic memory and artistic work. Invisibledrum presents the collective’s collaboration with pharmacologist researcher Aleksandre Smakosz in the creation of a contemporary mobile pharmacopoeia, digital pilgrimage, Nordic herbarium, and a “black book”. It will present the group’s findings in the work of historian and archaeologist Liv Helene Willumsen and other historical sources.

Invisibledrum is an artistic research platform investigating holistic practices and spiritual technologies within the field of art and new ecologies. Invisibledrum studies animistic practices within transdisciplinary fields of knowledge, encompassing amongst others the arts, creative ecologies, technology, embodied cognition, healing practices, speculative design, herbology, and ethnobotany.

The Body as a Magical Entity and the Mechanical Body at the Age of Reason
Silvia Federici
Lecture and group discussion
Duration: 60 mins
Place: Online and streamed at Kunsthall Trondheim

This lecture exposes the capitalist roots of particular socioeconomic conditions that fomented witch hunts throughout Europe. Federici uncovers the basis of these misogynist and femicidal responses as indivisible from men’s fear of women’s knowledge, labor, and power. Witchcraft and magical views of the world continued to prevail on a popular level throughout the Middle Ages, despite the suppressive efforts of the church. At the basis of witchcraft was the animistic conception of nature that did not admit any separation between spirit and matter and thus imagined the cosmos as a living organism, populated by occult forces, where every element was sympathetic to the rest. Plants, herbs, metals, and most of the human body hid virtues and powers peculiar to it. Eradicating these practices was a necessary conduction for the capitalist rationalization of work, since magic appeared as an illicit form of power and an instrument to obtain what one wanted without work—a refusal of work in action.

Silvia Federici is a Marxist feminist researcher, educator, and activist of Italian origin. She is the author of the acclaimed book Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation (New York, Autonomedia, 2004), and has taught at various North American universities and at the University of Port Harcourt in Nigeria. She is Professor Emeritus at Hofstra University (Long Island, New York).

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