Institute of Contemporary Art Miami ICA Miami

Stefania Pandolfo, “Between Captivity and Infinity: Mental Pain, Possession and Aesthetic Form”

“During this three-day seminar we will address the question of possession from the perspective of affliction, and in relation to a practice of art, which we will explore as a modality of mediumship at a time of “post-shamans.” We will reflect on the capacity of spirit entities and aesthetic forms to enable spaces of healing for persons and collectivities, in the confrontation with trauma and historical rupture, and in the experience of mental pain. And we will entertain the thought that in their inception aesthetic forms may be bound to primary affects and the experience of trauma itself, a wound which is at once a cut and an opening. An opening and a passageway.

“The words rendered in European languages as “possession” are recalcitrant to assimilation. In a multiplicity of languages and environments they invoke being touched, or intruded, violated, traversed, borrowed, inhabited, mounted, transformed, multiplied, broken apart, or ecstatically raptured. I think possession and mediumship from the vantage point of my work in North Africa on modes of Islamic spirituality and cures, where the resonance of the Arabic term mulk, which denotes possession as (landed) property, power and sovereignty in a worldly and otherworldly sense, opens onto an indeterminacy between captivity and infinity, the jinn and the soul, madness and mediumship, in a theater of the soul which is at once a psycho-political critique of oppression and a scene of world-ending and revelation.

“Once centrally present to the practice of sacred art, the curative, or agentive dimension of art is today restricted to the function of art-therapy. We may think of the effigy and the image-example, as portals to the Invisible and the unknown, the spirit world and the dream, and of their connection to the existential dimensions of, violence, life and death. The relationship of aesthetic forms and the cure takes the front stage in ritual and spiritual-medical practices, as well as in the modality of disfiguration and distortion in certain trends in European and extra-European modern art and poetics, and in that frequentation of the unknown and the uncanny that are psychoanalysis, as well as, in a certain way, anthropology. While spirit cures are often considered in opposition to psychiatry and psychoanalysis, we will seek to reverse the gaze and address mental pain as a modern form of mediumship, one that sheds light on the entanglement of the psyche and the soul, of the realm of spirits and the scene of the unconscious in a time of violence and war, of historical and cosmological crisis.

“In this perspective, we will explore the capacity of artistic practices to produce a shift in the coordinates of the real, carrying us beyond the boundary of the visible and the invisible, the living and the dead, to produce uncanny and unexpected angles from which to feel, think, and see. Artistic, psychoanalytic, and mediumistic practices explore the gaps and silences of modernity and reason. May these traumatic cuts be also passageways which may grant us access to an otherwise?”

Syllabus

Each seminar will be divided in two parts. During the first hour I will present for about 45 minutes, with 15 minutes of questions and interventions from the group. During the second hour we will have a workshop based on the readings for each session, attempting to relate them to experiences and situations in the world. Prior to each seminar, participants are encouraged to share with me and (if possible) with the group their written reflections on the readings. The workshop will be an experiment in collaborative thinking.

• Day One of the seminar will be structured around a reading of sections of my book Knot of the Soul. I will share a bundle of PDF of related readings, including short excerpts from Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and Studies on Hysteria, and from Islamic mystics Al-Ghazali and Ibn `Arabi. Film: Leila Kilani, Indivision (2022).
• Day Two of the seminar will focus on readings on (spirit) possession and historical trauma while positing at the same time the question of the artwork: Excerpts from J. Boddy’s Womb and Alien Spirits, R. Morris’s In the Place of Origins, E. Ng A Time of Lost Gods, M. de Certeau, Possession at Loudun. Video: Kader Attia, “Catharsis” (2018).
• Day Three of the seminar will revolve around mediumistic writing and artistic practice and the “surpassing disaster”. It will focus on the poetry and painting of Etel Adnan, and the writing and videography of Jalal Toufic, and the collaborative post-shamanic poetic reflections of Jerome Rothenberg and Heriberto Yépez. Video: Jalal Toufic, “The Lamentation Series, the Ninth Night” (2015).