[-empyre-] RUDERAL WITCHCRAFT

[margaretha haughwout]

Dear empyreans,

For this first week of November’s Magick and Technology conversation, we
will begin with the topic of Ruderal Witchcraft. We begin with place and
plants. With territory, territorialization/deterritorialization,
occupation.

Drawing from Sylvia Federici’s work on the persecution of witches in the
early Modern period, we think about how the work of commoning, of
multispecies cultivation, and anti-capitalist resistance have been
intertwined. We address how the ruderal is an increasingly global condition
in the Anthropocene, and is simultaneously an archive of ruin and a space
of possibility, of healing, commoning -- all spaces of witchery.

Arguably, the end of Feudalism was brought about by the climate event of
the Little Ice Age, the Black Death, and by persistent peasant organizing
in commoning environments across Europe. Women, in particular, older women
were often central to this organizing. They were skilled in the use of
plants and worked with natural cycles that shaped celebrations, harvests,
and divination processes. They often held the memory of negotiations around
land and resource use. If patriarchal capitalism was to take hold, they
needed to be removed. Federici tracks how the demonization and
extermination of witches in Europe not only produces the docile white woman
but also becomes the template for the demonization, oppression, and
extermination of colonized subjects across the European colonies.

In this new climate event that is best articulated as the Capitalocene or
the Plantationocene, how can ruderal, ‘ruined’ landscapes invite us to
renegotiate power relationships, invite gestures of rebellion, of
recuperation? How can they be incantatory spaces, magical spaces,
transformative, and invite deepened entanglements, deepened
responsibilities/abilities-to-respond, in essence: revivified commons?

I am so honored to be joined by Oliver Kellhammer and Marisa Prefer this
month, and we welcome discussants from other weeks, and the larger -empyre-
community to join us in conversation.

…

Oliver Kellhammer (US/Canada) he/him/his
Oliver Kellhammer is an artist, writer, and researcher, who seeks, through
his botanical interventions and social art practice, to demonstrate
nature’s surprising ability to recover from damage. Recent work has focused
on the psychosocial effects of climate change, decontaminating polluted
soil, reintroducing prehistoric trees to landscapes impacted by industrial
logging, and cataloging the biodiversity of brownfields. He is currently a
lecturer in sustainable systems at Parsons in NYC.

He is based in New York's Alphabet City and rural British Columbia.

Marisa Prefer (US) they/them/theirs
Marisa Prefer is an educator, artist, and herbalist who works to translate
knowledge between plants and human communities. Marisa facilitates
trans-disciplinary projects rooted in queer and marginal ecologies,
de-centering human, colonizer and patriarchal perspectives in favor of
calling in the invisible labors of microbes, mycelium, mosses and mice to
help reimagine relations to land, ownership and food.

Marisa is a Horticulturalist-in-Residence at Pioneer Works in Red Hook,
Brooklyn; helps to manage Soil Start Farm at Earth Matter on Governors
Island, has studied with Rosemary Gladstar at Sage Mountain Botanical
Sanctuary and recently contributed to projects Carbon Sponge with Brooke
Singer, Swale with Mary Mattingly, and Seeds of Change with Maria Thereza
Alves.

Margaretha Haughwout (US) she/her/hers, or they/their/theirs

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