Future Artefacts X The Couch; Magic and Technology

For this episode we are bringing together three special guests to introduce our new collaboration with Het HEM. We’ve brought back artists Rebeca Romero (Ep.3) and Akinsola Lawanson (Ep.7) together with curator Maia Kenney to discuss magic and technology within their works and research. Romero’s exploration of trance in The New Worshipers and Lawanson’s spirit world in Bosode each examine the intersections of these themes, how they influence each other, and how might magic in the present influence technological futures. Hear Romero, Lawanson, Kenney, and of course your hosts, examine how our relationship to talismans, phones, and worldbuilding can be more entangled than you might think. Collectively we consider the materiality of known and unknown worlds, the politics of witchcraft and what ethics might be necessary before engaging in scientific fact and mystical forces. For this extended conversation we will also be introducing Het HEM’s The Couch, a digital editorial and arts platform to continue these debates through texts, screenings and online discourse.

Rebeca Romero is an interdisciplinary artist born in Peru and based in London.

Through a range of media that includes sculpture, ceramics, textiles, sound, performance and video, she explores concepts of diasporic identity, truth, fiction, and their relationship to the digital age. Often combining Pre-Columbian iconography with advanced scanning and printing technologies and materials ranging from clay to plastic, her works swing drastically between the past and an alternate future. Examining the story-telling potential of artefacts, Romero looks into the intervention of the digital archive as a history-making technique. Online museum archives become an excavation ground for the collection of data that she later recontextualizes, reassembles and re-presents.

Akinsola Lawanson is a British-Nigerian multidisciplinary artist living and working in London. He works in moving images, installations and video-game engines in projects that examine relational systems, digital technologies and process philosophy. Akinsola’s video works are inspired by the alt-Nollywood movement, which borrows narrative, stylistic and visual conventions of Nollywood but with politically subversive ends.

Maia Kenney is an art historian, curator and critic specialised in the feminist underpinnings of modernist art movements (and a proponent of the destruction of Modernism as a Eurocentric storytelling device). She is the curator and editor of The Couch, Het HEM's digital artistic platform, and teaches theory in the Master of Contextual Design at Design Academy Eindhoven.