Mystical In-betweeners
Let Fire burn and cleanse,
the wands hear my wish.
Remake!
I conjure a new world.
Here I am power.
Here I am strength.
Universe One exhibition is an extension of an Augmented Reality project (Re)imagine City/(Re)imagine Home. The core concept of the (Re)imagine City/(Re)imagine Home Project is to create an opportunity for artists to imagine how they can reshape their cities’ environments, to imagine putting their works in spaces they couldn’t invade with physical materials and help them create their unrealized projects virtually while getting involved in the process of adding social cultural values to cities.. It’s no secret that Public Art in Myanmar is scarce. Public Art is scarce in Myanmar not because the artists don’t create, but because they don’t have opportunities to put their artworks in certain public places where Art can’t infiltrate unless commissioned. With Augmented Reality, the public will be able to interact and see the artworks via Instagram feed. This method transcends time and space, and breaks barriers of 2/3 dimensional artworks on the gallery spaces. The public is able to interact with the artworks more closely, examine, play and get as close as possible to an artwork.
Initially, Universe One was not part of the (Re)imagine City project. The Augmented Reality exhibition was planned to be hosted on Instagram only. When the Myanmar Military staged a coup on February 1st 2021, everything changed. The ever-narrow space for art in public has become narrower with each bullet fired. Artists are actively being excluded and silenced from their own spaces, their home and their city every day. The continuing anxiety, uncertainty, suffocation and persecution needed to be met with a resistance system. How do the truly powerless rebel against the truly powerful? To truly rebel, the project needed to step out of cyberspace and claim a bigger identity than it already has. This is where Universe One comes in.
Universe One is a world reconstruction magic spell the witch Irene Belserion cast to win an advantage against her opponents during the final war in Japanese manga, Fairy Tail. The spell reconstructed the terrains of the country Fiore; jumbling up the whole geographical structure. Fiore after Universe One is a land of Irene’s liking, a space she constructed with the aim of winning the war.
While escaping into the made-up space with 3 dimensional materials and virtuality, we wanted to venture into the 5D space and practice our own #MagicResistance, the popular movement against the Trump administration during the years he was in office. Relying on witchcraft as a source of resistance or salvation was not unique to movements against Trump. Feminists have also used witchcraft as a way to fight patriarchal structures. The truly powerless with no resources in hand can only swear on the dust on the ground in hopes that the mother earth itself would turn on the truly powerful who is safeguarded by tyrannical infrastructures they have built. This is where the obsession with the idea of ‘Witchpunk’ comes in.
“What about tech of a different kind? Not the steel and plastic technology of the everyday, but the techniques and methodologies of preternatural and mystical practices? Of high mysteries and esoteric knowledge?”
“The way cyberpunk is often summed up is “High tech. Low life.”... If that is the easy summation of cyberpunk, then I suppose witchpunk would be best defined as “High magick. Low life.”
Witchpunk: The Sub-Genre We need by Equanimous Rex, Sep 30, 2017.
If we combine the cyberspace, physical space and the magick that surrounds this exhibition, perhaps we have ventured into a genre of Cyber-witch punk, “High tech. High Magick. Low life.” Universe One, as an extension of the (Re)Imagine City/(Re)Imagine Home AR Exhibition, is a creation of a new cityscape, an utopia of free expression, a space where artworks can freely exist. The virtual city’s landmarks are replicas of those in the real world, however, the city creates a new world order of what these places mean and how the artworks relate to them. A dreamscape of the wildest imaginations, this space embodies both escapism and a portal to an impossible city. Utopian ideas and dystopian realities coexist in this cityscape. We are free in this made-up space, but the reality of us being cast out of our public spaces still remains.
In this sense, all of us who have produced this show are mystical in-betweeners. In-betweenness is a weird space to be in. Bodies/ materials stayed in suspension between various planes, never truly becoming either one of them they belong to. We belong to the public spaces that we have been cast out of but we cannot belong to them artistically, at least not at the moment. Our AR artworks will infiltrate many places but it will never materialize in the physical reality. We can pretend that we have created a utopian cityscape in the premises of this exhibition or that we have reconstructed a new world but we cannot deny the truth that it is just a room. A simple idea to comment on the scarcity of public art has become a longing to ever find belonging in our own spaces again.
If there is ever one consolation, it is that our made-up space, however unreal it may be, can hold together communities, people, expressions, conversations while using the reimagined cyberspace to disrupt the contained histories of places they are speaking to. With Magick that surrounds the space, we hope to infect our intentions and manifestations of a better world into the bodies of you, the audience. As you leave this space holding magick in your bodies and spreading this energy, perhaps a better world is possible. A better world where we mustn’t escape constantly.
Technowitch
Curator
Universe One exhibition and (Re)imagine City/ (Re)imagine Home Project
Universe One exhibition was on display 3rd - 12th April 2022 at Myanm/art Gallery.
(Re)imagine City/(Re)imagine Home is online on Instagram @re_imagine_city.
