Exhibition opening: Sud e magia - Nuno da Luz

Sud e magia
Nuno da Luz


Exhibition opening: 21_7_2016 / 20.17
Exhibition dates: 22_7 – 1_10_2016


“All I can tell you is that we are fluid, luminous beings made of fibres.” 
Carlos Castaneda

Inspired by the writings of Carlos Castaneda, Sud e magia (South and Magic) aims to challenge the idea of culture(s) as a universal and a prefabricated consensus, which determines one's understanding of his/her surrounding and one's role within a web of pre-determined and previously described relations as fixed. This predominantly Western perception of reality as an absolute, driven by a social contract of a specific cultural context, results in static comprehension of reality and in the inability for change in thought or in behavioural patterns. 

Through the prism of the present day environmental crisis, a need to shift these behavioural patterns as a means to tackle climate change and further exploitation of nature becomes pertinent. Although fictional, the writing of Castaneda here becomes particularly useful, namely due to the authors interest in shamanism, spiritualism and the tribes of the Southwestern United States and Nortwestern Mexico, whose rejection of an absolute reality and the refusal of Western materialism, introduces a number of productive alternatives of re-establishing relations with the natural. These arise namely through a bi-verse or even a multiverse approach to a series of separate realities of the so-called non-rational. 

A popular method of achieving such a “state” came hand in hand with Castaneda’s interest in the botanical, and his experimentation with hallucinogenic and psychotropic plants. Originally endemic to Mexico and Southwestern United States, Datura Stramonium (Jimson Weed or Devil's weed) is considered an invasive species in Europe and an unwanted weed frequently growing on cultivated/farmed lands. It serves us here as an illustration of the fixed relationship determined by a prefabricated consensus and of our inability to stop the world in order to arrive at seeing. (The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, 1968)

Markéta Stará Condeixa
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Sud e magia presents a series of new works produced and composed for the purpose of the show and is a continuation of the artist’s engagement with the dichotomy between the natural and the cultural. The exhibition will be accompanied by a series of performances and performative discussions of the Coyote collective, which will take place throughout September 2016.