SomoS Arts, in collaboration with curator Arianna Forte, is pleased to announce a Call for Projects as part of her curatorial research project Casting a Spell in Computational Regimes: Ritual Practices for a Trans-Feminist Counter-Apocalypse in fellowship with the Italian Council.
Background
The renowned Italian anthropologist Ernesto De Martino dedicated years to investigating the ritual strategies of traditional cultures. He defined these rituals as cultural instruments of protection or redemption, crucial for supporting any collapse of an ordered universe of meanings. The symbolic efficacy of rituals—their actions, repetitions, and intentionalities—served to exorcize profound existential crises, including the perception of the end of the world.
Contemporary Context
In today’s world, we face numerous crises, from the pervasiveness of digital systems and the dominance of patriarchy to the collapse of climate change and the surveillance regimes of late capitalism. This Call for Projects seeks to explore contemporary rituals that resist these entropic crises and address the current cultural imaginaries. We are interested in how artistic practices can take the form of rituals, as defined by De Martino, to cope with the apocalyptic omens hovering in our toxic air.
Call for Projects
We invite artists to submit their digital esoteric ritual practices, personal or collective cultural tools, and any form of artistic expression that navigates the ineffable aspects of contemporary life. We are particularly interested in works that focus on gender inequalities and digital capitalism and that try to overcome the computational and pharmapornographic actual regimes.
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