JAWS: Journal of Arts Writing by Students - Volume 9, Issue 1-2, 2023

Astrology and Tarot are trending in some queer-feminist circles, which is also reflected in the art world. However, their use raises ethical and political questions, for instance: when is white artists’ use of magic neo-colonial or appropriative? Why does the political right also use esoteric magic for their propaganda? How is magic in artistic practice affected by the profit-driven boom of astrology apps and digital Tarot services? Based on Tarot, I created a card deck with interpretive texts questioning the use of magic in art called Counterspeculative Constellations. The reader pulls cards to create a constellation of critical concepts in an intuitive, serendipitous and ritualistic way. This article looks at some of the curatorial aims of the use of magic in art and how they can sometimes fall into a trap of ‘cruel optimism’. I then share some ideas of how critical analysis might be brought to magical practice, and how the powers of magic can be used to deepen critical discourse.

The chair I am sitting in is unsteady as it rocks back and forth with the shifting of my weight. I get up to retrieve the information sheet, laid out for me on the desk by the hotel staff. I fold it up and place it under one of the legs. This steadies it. I unpack my suitcase, placing my wig carefully on the bed and my camera next to it. I get to work…. This article examines the hotel as a non-place, building on the work of Marc Augé, and as a site for historically othered bodies to negotiate identity and desire. Following on from Joanna Walsh’s play between the terms guest and ghost (2015), the author forms her own ghostly occupation: situating her own art practice within the writing of Hélène Cixous and the works of Adam Dade and Sonya Hanney.

Virginia Woolf’s final novel, Between the Acts, is often described as the culmination of her own eco-philosophy. ‘Nature’ clearly plays a part in Miss La Trobe’s pageant. The entire performance takes place outdoors on the Pointz Hall estate, where various sounds of nature – from the chirping of birds to the calls of cattle – interject into each scene. Towards the end of the performance, sudden rainfall interrupts La Trobe’s ‘Present Time’ act. Through this natural interruption, both artist and audience manipulate the meaning of the storm to fit their own apprehension of the ‘Present Time’. By exploring this moment in the text, I argue that Between the Acts illustrates the way artistic conceptions of nature remain inextricably linked to human experience. In Woolf’s novel, nature remains deeply resonant with human thought.

‘In sympathy’ (Cloth/Felt#1- 1993) describes the memory of a formative sensorial encounter with the work Homogeneous Infiltration for Piano (1966) by German artist Joseph Beuys at the Pompidou centre in 1993. Through a combination of somatic art criticism and visual storytelling, Reid recounts the first-hand effect of this sculptural encounter. Through autoethnographic descriptions that merge the architecture of the building, the site of the city, the author’s own mental and physical state and her impressions of the artwork, the text uses a phenomenological approach to understand a sculptural experience, with a focus on the sensorial impact of material agencies.

In this article, I situate the concept of conversational drift within a compare and contrast analysis of one of my works, Just a Spoonful (2021) and Helen and Newton Harrisons’ (aka the Harrisons’) artwork, Lagoon Cycle (1974–84). I suggest that conversational drift and, more-widely, posthuman or more-than-human conversations provide a dynamic plurality to practice-based research engaging across hierarchies and disciplinary boundaries to articulate a contemporary art practice in relation to ecology. I develop the concept of conversational drift, reflecting on my practice in the context of environmental and eco-artists, artist collectives, communication and conversation theory, mapping and drift or dérive. In my analysis, I explore the potential of conversational drift – through the nature of conversation and applicability of drift – as a means of evoking meaning and transforming perceptions of the value of soil ecosystems and the impact of industrial agriculture on the land.

This article builds on the author’s master’s thesis in architecture ‘Shared domesticities: Social infrastructure as an auxiliary tool for mitigating discrimination based on socioeconomic status in public and semi-public space’, further investigating the impact of the lack of social infrastructure on the ability to meet fundamental human needs in public space on a case study of Prague. This is examined against the backdrop of punitive urban practices, through which neo-liberal ideologies protect their territories from economically unprofitable – thus undesirable – influences. The text underscores the discord between conceptualizations of public space usage, leading to the punishment of inherently benign activities essential to basic human needs, such as sleeping, drinking or excreting. The central focus revolves around the potential of architectural interventions to enhance the living conditions of unhoused people, offering them protection against punitive policies that disproportionately target those displaying visual signs associated with social disadvantage. Approaching this matter from an architecture and urban planning perspective, the thesis proposed the implementation of social infrastructure in the form of public kitchens and bathrooms situated within unbuilt urban spaces and existing public institutions. By leveraging these areas, the intent is to bridge the gap in services and support for vulnerable populations, offering environments that empower individuals to shield themselves from punitive measures grounded in socio-economic prejudice.

‘In my mother’s dimple’ is a longer-form essay of the voice-over taken from my film of the same name. It explores the potential for separate metaphorical archives held within the bodies of a mother and child, where the archive held within the mother is constantly updated with records of the child’s actions, words and physical presence and vice versa in the archive held within the child. It examines what such an archive could contain and how each might use it as both a holding place of, and a site of exploration for, their individual identities and what we might understand of ourselves through the gaze of those we love.

The primary purpose of this article is to consider the possibility of depicting absence in photographs and feasible ways to detect it. In addition, it also attempts to argue that depicting absence can be an aim of the work itself. The analysis was conducted through formal examination of various photographs exhibiting the concept of absence. This article is expected to generate a positive contribution in underlining the significance of highlighting and identifying photographs of absence for the development of the topic of photography as a causal medium.

White Nights is poet Urszula Honek’s debut short-story collection. It is published by MTO Press and translated by Kate Webster. It follows a series of tragedies that befall a small village in the Beskid Niski region in southern Poland. Țincoca approaches the review from a personal perspective, with an interest in Eastern European cultures of mourning and how they are translated into literature.