&Now 2015: Blast Radius

In our creative-critical presentation, we ask how the occult, as geography, is a making of energy that creates, represents, contains and contests the narratives lived as and through our bodies. Our presentation will explore occult geographies as both concept and artistic practice in its material, theoretical and textual manifestations and valences.  

We will interweave our pieces as a performative reading that seeks to amplify the presentation’s arguments and inquiries. In the place of a single-authored and delivered paper, we offer a collaborative, contrapuntal engagement that embodies the constitutive practices we discuss in our presentation. We ask how the occult, what often remains hidden or beyond our allowed knowledges and understandings, is a navigating force that invites us to embody alternative epistemological and narrative perspectives.

We ask how tracing occult geographies may catapult us into a different destiny and reform our bodies and ways of being. We explore how such attentions make visible embedded forms of state violence, including the built-environment and its manufactured realities. In accord, we analyze narrative treatments of the body as a polluted site and divining rod in contested social spaces. 

We examine the 19th century Victorian practice of using female clairvoyants to perform psychic explorations. Thus, how do female writers negotiate an audience that expects, condemns, and craves her otherworldliness? Further, we turn to current work on non-human materialisms and its challenge to humanist-centered discourses to map how what we inhale, swallow, rub against and commune with are often less-visible or avowed agents in our lives.