COSMIC COUNTERREADINGS - Walpurgisnacht Extravaganza

COSMIC COUNTERREADINGS accompany the exhibition through critically and collectively rereading COSMIC GIRLBOSS. Artistic and scholarly impulses alternate on exploring magic, gender, and spiritual entrepreneurship. Around Walpurgis Night, researchers talk and artists perform to challenge old narratives — re-reading, refuting, and counter-narrating. For three days, interactive performances and talks take place at Galerie im Turm.

The first event of the COSMIC COUNTERREADINGS takes place on Walpurgis Night (30 April), with two intimate, ritualistic, hypercapitalist performances.

Information for the Saturday event (2 May)

Information for the Sunday event (3 May)

WALPURGISNACHT SCHEDULE

Blood Money by Dera Luce

What you seek is seeking you.

Breathing Exercises for Market Attunement by Salesforce Child

A seminar on the relationship between two Salesforce Child teachings: “Your general mental state is supposed to be dictated by how global financial markets are doing. They were literally created as a guiding register to tune into, and for all humans to connect this way,” and “The only way to effect change in the world is to meditate with enough focus and intensity to impact various financial markets.” The seminar will extend these principles into lived practice, instructing participants in methods for attuning to and influencing real-time market dynamics.

BIOGRAPHIES

Dera Luce is a Nigerian-American interdisciplinary storyteller who calls Berlin home. His art/work explores queerness, linguistics, spirit economics, shifting realities, and other extraordinary experiences that he is still finding the words for. He is a Summer ’22 Fellow of Voodoonauts, a grassroots Afrofuturist SFF collective. During his residency with Dreaming Beyond AI, Dera created Heal-GPT (Slowed + Reverb), an audio-zine and physical installation exploring the intersection of time (money) and intelligences both spiritual and artificial. The work has been exhibited at Kampnagel (2023) and re:publica (2024).

Across painting, video, performance, writing, drawing, and social media, Summer Emerald’s/Salesforce Child‘s work speaks in an idiosyncratic yet immediately recognizable blend of corporate and devotional language. The work reflects the semiotic chaos of contemporary systems, imbued with the sense that what we have built is leaving us behind.

COSMIC COUNTERREADINGS is coorganised by the research group ENCHANTED EPISTEMES, represented by Celica Fitz.

Spirituality, esotericism and magic are popular terms often used to subsume non-hegemonic epistemologies. This research collective develops the concept of “enchanted epistemes” as a tool for examining current ways of knowing and worldmaking in group rituals, healing, in digital spaces and material culture, contemporary art, and their intersections with academia.

Examining such contemporary forms and processes of performative (re-)enchantment, the research collective seeks to connect theoretical and methodological approaches from the aesthetics of religion and material religion, sociology of religion and knowledge, history of religions, and gender studies. The research group’s goal is to collectively develop the term ENCHANTED EPISTEMES as a tool for researching contemporary spiritual practices and aesthetics of knowledge.

This project is supported by the Berlin Senate Fund for Presenting Contemporary Art in Berlin.