Magical practices (and design) as tools for experiencing the world in a different way.
We, modern Westerners, know how to discover. We measure the world, divide it, and model it. We are far less adept at encountering it. Building on the ontological turn in the human sciences over recent decades, this essay examines design projects that, beyond the boundaries of their own discipline, reveal dispositifs for encountering what modernity has often dismissed as hallucination or folklore: invisible forces, energies, entities, and presences. Here, magic is not an illusion but a technology of connection. Nine designers and collectives—Dunne & Raby, Amor Muñoz, Keight, Khoren Matevosyan, Felipe Ribon, Kiko Gianocca, Teresa Fernández-Pello,
mountaincutters, and Anna Zoe Hamm— trace the contours of a Western design capable of inhabiting the pluriverse, contacting active entities, and, in doing so, opening pathways towards the ecological transitions we so urgently need, both individually and collectively.
Scott Longfell ow is a curator at
mudac in Lausanne and a specialist in contemporary design. His work explores the relationships between design, ecology, technology, and speculative futures.
