Program of lectures Fall Cycle

(sessions semester 1, 2020/2021)

In this (self)educational program we put our ears to the earth and listen carefully to the many-gendered witches that history couldn’t burn. Many second-­wave feminist groups and contemporary traditions like Wicca and WITCH (the Women’s International ­Terrorist ­Conspiracy from Hell), found an embodiment of the supreme and divine feminine in the figure of the witch. These groups did the relevant and necessary groundwork. However they relied on essentialistic and binary notions of gender, which empowered some at the expense of excluding others.

Today the witch resurfaces in new and more ­inclusive guises, to respond to the current convergence of multiple crises and connect personal practice with social analysis. In this program, we approach witchcraft as first and foremost a ­contemporary feminist liberatory practice; offering tools for story­telling, survival and radical care that strongly appeal to queer, trans folx, gender non-binary and conforming people, BIPOC. Sometimes a broom is not just a broom, but a ­dildonic device that allows wounded healers to draw circles and boundaries, pointing at the end of this structurally racist and sexist world as they know it. ­Ultimately these healers have always had to use magic to survive.

As Silvia Federici wrote in her book Caliban and the Witch - one of the great inspirations for this cycle - witch hunts were not just some folkloric excesses or harmful echoes of an irrational dark age. Rather, our contemporary capitalist society has been built on the devastation of the natural world and the total devalu­ation, ­mechanization and disownment of womxns' bodies. This process found a first fulcrum in the witch hunts of the 16th and 17th century; but the shape of oppression shifts all the time and continues till this very day. ­Patriarchal ­capitalism defines itself through the violent disciplining, submission and value extraction of queer, black, ­colonized, disabled and female bodies. The connections between the oppression of these different bodies run wide and deep. The contemporary Wxtch is well-aware of these intersecting struggles and proudly reclaims the figure with the intent to spoil the neoliberal rage fest to the bone.

Interventions in the shrine by all participating KABK students can be followed via our instagram page