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. 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. “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. 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. 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.
“The words rendered in European languages as “possession” are recalcitrant to assimilation. 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.
“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. Stefania Pandolfo, “Between Captivity and Infinity: Mental Pain, Possession and Aesthetic Form”
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