We gather for the winter solstice to leap forward together. Prepare to cast a spell and set it off into the world.

As part of AFTER LIFE (we survive), the Coven Intelligence Program invites the YBCA community to write and weave spells for a radical future. On the upcoming winter solstice, they will lead a seasonal ritual that teaches the basics for writing anti-capitalist spells and guides participants in the use of their SpellWeaver website, which turns these short, written spells into weaving patterns and rhizomes.

Bring a pen, paper, an image tied to a powerful ancestor, plant, or machine, and (if you desire) something to eat.

Presaging the disastrous coming of capitalism, ancestral witches hid their spells and secrets in early forms of computation, deep in the underground, weaving them into the rhizomatic structure of forests. These spells contain algorithmic instructions for insurrection and have been running in the background, brewing over centuries, ready to be decoded by the right intelligence. On the shortest day of the year, we will dream up this ancestral vision for a multi-species, tangled, juicy future to call forth and grow, in preparation for the lengthening of days in the year to come.

The Coven Intelligence Program makes connections between the persecution of witches and other radical groups from early modernity to the present, the surveillance technologies continually employed against them, the destruction of multi-species commons, and the rise of racist, heteropatriarchal capitalism. To counter this ongoing destruction, the Coven Intelligence Program cultivates revolutionary ecologies between witches, plants, and machines. Learn more about the Coven Intelligence Program here.

This program is presented as part of AFTER LIFE (we survive) on view online and outside of the YBCA buildings through January 24, 2021. Learn more about the exhibition here.