Do you believe in what exists?

Abstract

Avoiding epistemological extractivism, this essay tries to imagine a context that does not exoticize magical thinking or contemplate it exclusively within an ethnographic niche, seeking a Western animistic tradition. We propose so-called “dark ecology" as one of the keys to re-animate Western thought and transcend the modern separation between culture and nature, decolonizing thought and allowing us to value the knowledge of other culture-natures. Dialoguing with the work of various contemporary artists who are either interested in these issues or practitioners of forms of mediumship, one can glimpse an intricate mesh in which ecology, magic and decolonial thought come together.