Marc Brandeburg & Harun Farocki: Industrial Witchcraft Group show at the Die Insel einer Möglichkeit

Industrial Witchcraft brings together industrial, precarious, pornographic, magical, modern looks with reflections on production conditions and (artistic) work. The project is a reaction to the omnipresent pseudo-activist, pseudo-poetic Donna Haraway-Édouard Glissant bullshit -speak in contemporary art, with which we are fobbed off in a thoroughly passive-aggressive manner – and the systemic, affirmative zombie art talk that sounds as if you were in a spaceship or a tennis court in a nuclear bunker.

Instead of looking at the broken, fascist, burning, super-ordinary present of Soylent Green Ozempic capitalism, we are bombarded with endless, virtuous reflections on indigenous knowledge, nature, ancestors, the earth, with symbolism, rituals, surrogate actions. Or “culture wars” are waged against wokeness, trans rights, “anti-Semitism,” Islamic fundamentalism, left-wing positions, “witches,” and all kinds of non-heteronormative femininity, in which no one really wants to participate. While Germany shifts to the right, babies starve in Gaza, hostages die, the world burns, we celebrate the return to lost origins and spirituality, to ceramics and folklore, exclusive, sophisticated communities, to queer, apolitical, and completely opportunistic sensibilities, local myths, and ancient craft techniques.