NOW

Who Owns Us?
Experiments in the Game of Control
Conducted in 2024 by Ad Twister & Gast Bouschet

The experiments mentioned in the title take shape as a site-specific installation in a decaying building that served as a hospital for wounded soldiers during the Second World War and is now increasingly overgrown by rampant vegetation. Fueled by historical trauma and the current fear of ecological devastation and the looming threat of global war, our intervention seeks to transmute a space of abandonment and pain into an experience of empathic power. Make no mistake: sorcerous art is very much about power, but it is also unashamedly vulnerable. The fragility of the black painting and the already crumbling writings on the walls are integral to the work. The real purpose of our countercurse is to release its underlying forces through its material decay.

The work is based on a combination of what we call predatory abstraction with a series of diagrammatic spells that both desecrate the symbols of empire and activate the latent, regenerative alchemical energy of place. The intervention aims to avoid falling into apathy and despair in the face of a world that in many ways feels like evil magic. These are unprecedented and unpredictable times, but one piece of wisdom remains true: revolutions begin when we change the way we look at the world. And this is where sorcerous art comes in, because it changes perception and therefore the structure of reality.

Through affective spellwork we intervene in architectural and mental spaces and reshape them. Our intervention ultimately amounts to a kind of poiso-medicine that feeds into both the fabric of the building and in the neurological mechanisms of the brain that are responsible for the associations that form the basis for creative thinking. We have spread the incantations throughout the rooms so that they contaminate the building, but it is not so much about the countercurse itself, but what it triggers. May it unleash hidden possibilities that lead to active participation in our planetary future, rather than submission to the powers that be.