Category: Thinking
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(Re)Imagining the Insect
54 million years before humans appeared on earth, there was once upon a time an insect that died, its cadaver is still visible and intact, the cadaver of someone who was surprised by death at the instant it was sucking the blood of another! Jacques Derrida, Typewriter Ribbon, 1998 It is all very…
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Travelling with Unfamiliar Spirits
Taking place this October – just in time for Hallowe’en – is a two-week festival of esoteric art, entitled I:MAGE 2014, that promises to explore the fertile relationship between artists and spirit entities. If the world of the esoteric can often seem closed off (almost by definition) then I:MAGE 2014 goes some way towards breaking…
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Walking in the Sky
A small brown kestrel rises over the crest of a hill and pauses, hanging in the wind, scanning the fields below. With a tilt of its wings, it shifts vantage point twice, three times, hangs for a moment, then suddenly slides downwards, a gleam of silver under the high sun. Six foot from the ground,…
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Fungiculture
This summer sees the launch of a brand new academic journal: Fungiculture. Subtitled “A Journal for Psychedelic Culture Studies” Fungiculture was conceived over the past six months or so by a group of course-mates from Goldsmiths in order to provide, in their words, “a space for the experimental and playful cultivation of ideas and practices,…
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The Junior Doctor
In the middle of a cabbage farm, an hour’s drive from the Andean town of Otavalo, Ecuador, is a small radio station on the ground floor of a farmhouse. Radio Ilumán is the local indigenous radio station, presented entirely in Kichwa. Each week Dr Nadia Montero and the director of Jambi Huasi drive to the…
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Psychosis in the Andes
Dr Patricio practices indigenous medicine in a small clinic in the Andes. Sometimes he describes himself as a doctor, sometimes as a yachac or shaman. Here, the two are interchangeable. Western and indigenous medicine inform and shape each other. The clinic in which he practices is called Jambi Huasi, meaning ‘House of Health’ in Kichwa,…
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On Collaboration
SJ Fowler is a poet, artist, martial artist and vanguardist. He works across poetry, sonic art, visual art, installation and performance, has published five books and been commissioned by the Tate, Mercy, and the London Sinfonietta. He is the poetry editor of 3:AM magazine and founder of the Maintenant series. Most recently, Fowler has curated…
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Ending Ecocide in Europe
It’s strange to think that, although crimes against humanity are an established (albeit recent) aspect of international law, no such equivalent exists for the non-human. As Jacques Derrida puts it in The Beast and the Sovereign: “There is no ‘crime against animality’ nor crime of genocide against nonhuman living beings.” Ecocide is a crime, however,…
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The Jambi Huasi Clinic
The town of Otavalo, just two hours from Quito, is a place where Ecuador’s indigenous Andean population has thrived for thousands of years. The Quichua indígenas (indigenous people) in Otavalo make up a large proportion of the city’s population and although many still live in poverty, the socio-economic status of the community is high compared…