Dayna Casey & Erika Sprey (Talk)

Part of Session #6: Wxtchcraft (with Juliette Lizote)
Sunday 19 June | 16:15 - 18:00
Location: Likeminds

Visual artist Dayna Casey and curator Erika Sprey will talk about Wxtch Craft (KABK Studium Generale): approaching witchcraft as a contemporary queer feminist liberatory practice, appealing to queer, trans folx, gender non-conforming people, and BIPOC. Healing justice is central to this talk. The witch initially heals themselves, but always does this with that other, greater healing in view: the historical, social, systemic, ideological and institutional. They show what role feminist publishing (zine) can play in offering tools for community care and survival, acting as portals to collective reorientation and accountability.

Dayna Casey (1988, The Hague) is an artist, researcher, writer and graphic designer. She is co-editor/initiator and designer of the KABK Wxtch Craft zine with Erika Sprey, exploring wxtch craft as a queer feminist liberatory practice. She has an MA in Art Praxis and Critical Theory from the Dutch Art Institute, and is a prospective resident at the Jan van Eyck post-graduate academy. Recent research has revolved around anxieties of sense-making, setting out the stakes of pluralism and how it can be exploited by the right. In her practice she often unpacks objects or symbols and uses them as story-­telling devices to help think through complex entangled political matter(s). She is currently collaborating with artist Eline Benjaminsen on ‘Collapsed Mythologies: A Geofinancial Atlas’, unravelling financial slang and its etymological histories, revealing the absurd (super)natural ‘fictions’ that shape our worldly ecology.

Erika Sprey (she/her, Mexico/Netherlands) studied comparative literature, cultural analysis and philosophy at among others, the University of Amsterdam and as a Fulbright student at Columbia University in New York. Since 2010, she has been working as a curator, writer and dramaturgue for among others art and technology festival Robodock, arts and debate center de Balie in Amsterdam, Dutch national broadcaster VPRO and performing arts center Kaaitheater in Brussels. Often asked as process facilitator and organizer, she has been involved in local and international activism and guides participatory art and design projects revolving around - often sensitive and embodied - social, spatial and economic justice issues. Erika is trained in process work and is a certified system dynamics constellator, dwelling happily at the intersection between art and system dynamics, opening and holding transformative spaces where needed.

Presently, Erika works closely with, among others, artist and philosopher Peter Aers, with whom she is currently researching the different ontologies of social, more than human dreaming, and melanie bonajo, who represents The Netherlands in the next Venice Biennale. She is also program curator of the Studium Generale at the Royal Academy of the Arts in The Hague, currently unfolding the long-standing Wxtch Craft program that explores reclaiming witch craft as a queer, liberatory and feminist practice, and the thorough rewriting of eurocentric colonial histories, epistemologies and ontologies that this practice entails.

Dayna Casey
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INSTAGRAM →

Erika Sprey
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