‘The sacred is not a great something that you bow down to, but what determines your values, what you would take a stand for.’
Starhawk
‘Politics is that dimension of social life, in which things become true if enough people believe in them.’
David Graeber
Hundreds of individuals have introduced candles. Mounds of melted wax cowl the cobblestones, marking a spot in Prague’s Wenceslas Sq.. Regardless of it being against the law to show, folks collect right here. They arrive to gentle a candle in honor of an act of defiance in opposition to the communist regime that passed off 20 years beforehand.
We’re on the spot the place on 16 January 1969, the twenty yr previous historical past pupil Jan Palach set himself alight in protest on the crushing of the Prague Spring by Soviet tanks the earlier summer season. The spot the place he poured petrol onto his younger physique and lit a match, turned a spot of pilgrimage for dissidents to the Soviet regime. However in January 1989, on the 20 th anniversary of his dying, this fashionable altar to resistance turned a spark for the rising powder keg of anti-communist sentiments. When 2,000 folks gathered there, they have been attacked by police canine and water cannons. It was the opening act of the Velvet Revolution that erupted in pressure in November and toppled the regime in 11 days.
Wenceslas Sq. in November 1989. Supply: Wikimedia Commons
In 1989 I used to be a 24-year-old wonderful artwork pupil. A photograph of the candles and wax, remodeling a banal piece of the town area right into a particular sacred place, had a robust impact on me. A human sacrifice for freedom was adopted by mass rituals of grief which led to an rebellion. There was one thing so easy, archetypal and exquisite about it.
As a younger artist I used to be doing physique artwork performances, ritualistic acts involving my physique. I might lower my pores and skin, lie in oil lined water for days, insert fishing hooks into my physique.
The story of the wax monument introduced collectively all of the issues I used to be fascinated by: ritual, public artwork and performative protest. And but it was not artists or shamans doing it, not ‘special’ folks, however odd people, doing one thing extraordinary. One in all my academics on the time, Joseph Beuys, had claimed that ‘everyone is an artist’. A later instructor and comrade, the eco-feminist, activist, witch Starhawk, thinks that magic ought to by no means be monopolized by specialists: ‘Everyone can do the life-changing, world-renewing work of magic,’ she says, ‘the art of changing consciousness at will.’
In a context the place ‘protest’ was banned, the on a regular basis act of formality grief by folks, who didn’t essentially ‘look’ like protesters, was an illustration in disguise. Maybe much less harmful than frontal defiance, it put the authorities in a dilemma, which is all the time a robust resistance tactic. If the authorities repress folks doing a ritual with candles, it exposes their irrational violence. If the federal government lets it occur, it’d empower folks to dissent extra. Both manner the authorities lose.
Jungian psychoanalyst Lugi Zoja claims that rituals are an ‘archetypal necessity’ for people, and ethologists are more and more displaying us that many animals interact in them too. Ritual is the theatre of magic: transformation by way of communication. Magic as a result of they function by following the assumption that actuality will be formed relying on what we give our consideration to. Magic as a result of they assist us focus our intentions, regardless of the poisonous dispersal mechanisms of capitalism. They remind us what’s sacred. Theatre as a result of they’ve dramaturgy, scenography, masks and costumes. Theatre as a result of it’s all about our bodies shifting and opening up the senses. Ritual reminds us of what’s sacred, and that we wish to defend.
In ritual, we recreate our ties to one another. We’re reminded what true freedom is: a paradigm shift from the isolating, disconnected free electrons of the I, in a position to do what it needs, promised by capitalism. Fairly, ours is an embodied freedom, the place communities of people and more-than-humans are nested, entangled and tied up with one another. With out {our relationships} to our meals and mates, air and water, land and lovers, we aren’t free to flourish in any respect. We’re not solely embedded in relationships; our very identities are created by way of relationships. Rituals assist maintain these reciprocal relationships, they mark and allow change and but body the continuity of life, with its repetitions and cycles – they’re balancing acts. Most significantly they provide gratitude and remind us what it means to be a part of an entangled group of dwelling beings.
Already in 1989, I knew that there was far more potential within the energy of artwork and ritual than was potential in what artwork critic Suzy Gablik referred to as ‘the prisons of the art world’. 4 years later I might desert the artwork world and discover myself placing my physique in the way in which of the bulldozers, making an attempt to cease the constructing of motorways deliberate to destroy human and greater than human communities throughout the UK. My physique was not a metaphor however a software of civil disobedience. This was a efficiency that was making a concrete distinction and I used to be not doing it alone however with 1000’s of different rebels. I by no means appeared again.
Thirty years later, I’m writing from my residence, a yurt, on 1,650 hectares of forest, fields and wetlands, that if tens of 1000’s of individuals had not put their disobedient our bodies in the way in which, would have change into the runway of the Airport of Notre-dame-des-Landes. The zad (zone à défendre) is a territory that remodeled me deeply. The extra we inhabited this place, the extra it inhabited us. The extra we fought for it, the extra we fell in love with it.
Ritual disguised as an illustration
The wrestle in opposition to the airport of Notre-Dame-des-Landes lasted over forty years, starting within the Nineteen Seventies when farmers refused to let the state expropriate their farms. In 2008 a name by native inhabitants invited folks to come back and squat the land as a result of ‘to defend a territory you need to inhabit it’, they wrote in an open letter. Following a short lived local weather camp, a handful of activists stayed and the zad was born. An eviction try by the French police within the muddy winter of 2012 was responded to with a 40,000 robust demonstration to rebuild a resistant hamlet. The police have been pressured to retreat and for six years 350 folks lived a shared life collectively, farmed and produced in the way in which of the airport builders.
In January 2016 the French authorities introduced that each one authorized boundaries (protected species and many others.) had been overcome in courtroom, and that they might come to evict and construct the airport within the autumn.
A barricade on the Notre-Dame-des-Landes ZAD. Picture: Bstroot56 / supply: Wikimedia Commons
Inside days 20,000 folks, 500 tractors and 1000 bikes blocked the primary bridge of the town of Nantes. The next month 60,000 folks partied on the close by motorway, occupying precisely the purpose the place the primary bulldozers have been more likely to come.
Struggles are all the time a battle of the creativeness, and these actions, like rituals and spells, increase vitality and give attention to a transparent intention to create change: stopping the evictions.
On 8 October, when the specter of evictions peaked, 40,000 folks converged from three factors on the zone for a choreographed ritual, superbly disguised as an illustration. A lot of the motion was composed of native folks, farmers, no-god-no-masters anarchists and libertarian communists. Saying a ritual wouldn’t be mobilizing, presuppositions of esotericism can be rife. The decision requested folks to carry a strolling stick or workers.
This image was as a result of one of many ancestors of the wrestle, a radical peasant farmer who had just lately died, used to hold a workers as a memento from the Larzac wrestle. It was additionally an object that broke binaries: a workers is each a logo of care (it helps us stroll) and of battle (it may be used to defend oneself from the police). Over 20,000 folks caught their workers deep into the earth, making a pledge that they might return to get their stick and defend the land if the federal government got here to construct the airport. ‘We are here, we will be here!’ they promised. An earthen financial institution was remodeled into a large porcupine bristling tens of 1000’s of defensive sticks.
Because the sticks have been being planted, within the adjoining discipline the massive Barn of the Future was raised. An oak, cathedral-like construction inbuilt medieval methods, which is able to final 1000’s of years. It signified to the authorities that this was not only a precarious protest camp with cabins, however we have been right here for good. The following day TV units throughout the nation reverberated with the prime minister’s loop: ‘The evictions will happen. There can be no other way.’ It turned out to be the final mass motion of the motion in opposition to the airport. Magic doesn’t work in idea however does in observe. The federal government by no means got here to construct their airport. Magic doesn’t work in idea however solely in observe.
Rituals of regeneration
After the victory in opposition to the airport, celebrated with an enormous get together the place a large newt set alight an enormous wood airplane, the French authorities attacked the zad as an act of revenge. We not solely pressured the abandonment of an enormous infrastructure, however for six years confirmed that it was potential to reside collectively with out police or authorities. There may be nothing the authorities hate extra. For 3 days 4,000 police, drones, helicopters and tanks destroyed 40 of the 70 dwelling collectives, injuring 200 folks. A ceasefire pressured us into signing a legalization deal, and conflicts peaked on the zad across the dangers linked to normalization, the capitulation that such a gesture represented, and the need to maintain maintain of the land and {our relationships} for the long run.
For the primary anniversary of the abandonment on 17 January 2019, 4 of us fashioned La Cellule D’motion Rituel. Confronted with the trauma and battle that had scarred the bodyminds in our group, we aimed to make use of the facility of formality as a software of group care and therapeutic. The enormous newt puppet constructed for the get together to have fun the cancellation of the airport was introduced out of storage and given an enormous, pink, velvet coronary heart, damaged in two. Ghostly 3m tall riot police with monstrous glowing pink eyes have been felled, a particular track about rebirth from the ashes was sung by 200 folks holding burning torches. On the climax the newt’s coronary heart was repaired by mud masked spirits along with lots of of folks binding it with pink rope.
Newts have particular cells that allow them to self-repair their hearts if broken; it appeared a becoming metaphor for a ceremony of passage from one zad to the following, a ritual to come back to phrases with our grief collectively, to attach us to one another and our greater than people accomplices, who’ve taught us a lot about find out how to reside. The ritual ended with the lighthouse, constructed the place they wished to construct a management tower, being switched on to the sound of Bonnie Tyler’s Complete Eclipse of the Coronary heart. The gang danced contained in the newt because it wound its option to a luxurious banquet in a circus tent on the opposite aspect of the forest.
Ever since, la C.A.R has been designing and facilitating rituals on the zad, many mark the Eight Sabats for Witches of the Wheel of the Yr (reminiscent of Equinox, Samhain, and many others). We additionally design rituals which are wanted by the group for particular features. One ritual to eliminate our personal police in our heads and judgements in direction of others, concerned a wild recreation with mud and large cell masks and ended up burning an actual riot cop helmet. A number of concerned sigils, magic symbols to focus intention. We used them to guard the forest commons from being managed by the forestry fee and on the brand new (not authorized) buildings being constructed on the ruins of the farms destroyed in 2012 for the airport.
We don’t just like the solemnity of a lot up to date ritual making. Video games and pleasure are central for us. Now we have had queer ecology recreation reveals, hacked punk songs, a mister loyal drag king or erotic ecology video projections. Impressed by age previous traditions while fabricating our personal aesthetics, that we name ‘animist kitsch’, the goal of the CAR is to re-inscribe our lives within the cycle of life and seasons, and have fun collectively the enjoyment of being a part of this land and all its inhabitants, while honouring the legacy of a singular wrestle.
Rituals represent a robust structure to anchor the collective by giving it power and shared intentions in addition to participating within the elaboration of a typical narrative and creativeness. As Isabelle Stengers reminds us, there aren’t any commons with out ‘commoning’: commons are the fruit of relationships and practices, at their coronary heart are customs that should be created and deployed in a tradition that has virtually eradicated them.
For us ritual can be the other of what we time period ‘extractivist art’, as a result of in ritual you aren’t making a efficiency ‘about’ a wrestle, exported into an artwork area the place worth is shifted from a particular group to the artwork world and artist profession. Ritual is by its nature reciprocal, it provides again to the land, to the group of people and greater than people. We see a lot up to date artwork and efficiency as merely impoverished ritual, ritual and not using a place, gestures missing shared meanings or group. It’s tradition regardless of its etymological origins – cult and terra – to domesticate and take care of the earth. Tradition with out the cult – the reverence for all times that we so want in these stormy instances.
