We notice a rising practise of shamanism, magic and spirituality in the West since the late nineties. Moreover, terms such as technomagic, technoshamanism and technopaganism have been surfacing to designate a rising movement between art, spirituality and technology and still create confusion to this day. But the intertwining of the notions of “technology” and “magic(s)” could be seen as evidential when one operates spiritual practice as a technique to be studied, or when one faces the many ghosts animating technology.

This compilation of interviews engages different practitioners from Brazil, Belgium and Lithuania across multiple fields whose work is embedded within this subject to create a composition of points-of-view in relation to this movement.

On Technoshamanism and Tecnoxamanismo

Decadence as language, anti-xawara and indigenous health

Isabella Aurora Good night Fabi, good day in Brazil. Thank you for coming. I want to ask you some questions about the Technoshamanism network to understand the current state of the movement a little better, to get a better idea of what is happening in Brazil now, what this junction of technology and shamanism is.

Technoshamanism is a broad term, which, if we look at it from a conceptual perspective, can be seen as a school of thought. Having been one of the first to use this term in Brazil and one of the researchers of this concept, I would like to know what, for you, defines the basis of a techno-shamanistic philosophy.

I will start backwards, as I remember

01:37

Fabiane Borges Hi Isabella! ‘Isabella Aurora’, that's great. I want to thank Constant. I'll start backwards, as I remember.

(…) We tried to set up an NGO in Denmark. We tried to set it up in an attempt to find a way to earn money to make the Pataxó health post, that was the idea. We were trying to help the Pataxó¹ people where we held the second technoshaman festival to create a health post. They asked us to do it and we agreed.

I wanted to create a group to help me with Frazão, you, Raisa, Marina Morais and Carsten. We tried to set up this NGO, but it didn't work out because we couldn't open a bank account and there was no NGO to receive the money we were going to get in France (…) Anyway, the field got confused, the project was scattered, we had a dispute. And this group fell apart. The NGO in Denmark also disbanded.

(…) Then we managed to raise 30,000 reais through an anonymous donor and we were very happy. We were going to have the third international festival, which would have a different name because it was going to be another type of meeting called ‘Mutirão² of Indigenous Pataxó Health’. In it we were going to have a kind of festival, where everyone from the network would come and help the Pataxó to set up, in the form of a mutirão, the health post, spending seven days with them.

Then came the pandemic

06:35

… What happened was that the Pataxó had to do it alone because the pandemic came, the village closed and they themselves were ordered not to gather. So they could not even make the mutirão. So this money of 30,000 reais was also used to pay a group of professional masons to build the house designed by Ariane Stolfi.

That money was diluted (because) we hadn’t thought of hiring these masons, which makes it more expensive, and there was a pandemic and everybody was in need of money, so not paying the group of masons would have been unfeasible. Anyway, what we are doing now is negotiating with this French NGO to see if they can finish the job.

08:51

It's a done deed

Isabella Aurora Is it working?

Fabiane Borges It's not working yet because there are still some bureaucratic things to do, but the post is settled, it has a roof, it's built, right? It’s a done deed. So it’s an achievement. (…)

What a pity it was not built before the pandemic because it would certainly have been a place to help these (indigenous) families that caught the coronavirus. They don't have (access to health), it's an Indian village. They don't have an emergency room. They have to go either to other villages or to Porto Seguro, which is about 70 kilometres away, on a dirt road.

I didn't answer anything you asked, right?

Isabella Aurora No. In fact, you gave me an overview of the latest developments in the network, the last major action that took place last year, the mutirão with the Pataxó people. To explain a little bit, the Pataxó (…) today are very close to their mother village, which is Barra Velha, and specifically the subgroup we are working with is the Pataxó Pará Village.

But my question goes back more to the origins, to give us a background to understand. What school of thought is this? Why is it called techno-shamanism and what would be the basis of a techno-shamanic philosophy?

The beat was like a heartbeat

12:39

Fabiane Borges … About TX, I think it went like this: the first time the name came up was in England in the 1990s in rave culture. Then it spread as a kind of counterculture, with shamanism and electronic parties, an idea that the beat of electronic music was like the heartbeat (…) That covers the idea of shamanism as an ancient religion before all the damage done by monotheism and puts tech up front to show that it is ancestral.

Here in Brazil we have a slightly different story, but it only happened in the 2000s, which is the recovery of the word tecnoxamanismo because of the culture hotspots, a project of Gilberto Gil in the Lula government. The idea was to put free software to be applied in the furthest corners of the country (…) within indigenous, quilombola and riverain communities.

So this word technoshamanism started to emerge. It is the application of a digital technology within a traditional or ancestral system of existence. Then technoshamanism started to make a lot of sense and this had international repercussions that updated the definitions of technoshamanism that were being used in the past. But our footprint wasn't music, it was technique, it was technology.

Aesthetic decadence is a language

22:00

Isabella Aurora (…) from this constellation of experiences, what practices or proposals have you seen carried out that you consider techno-shamanic?

Fabiane Borges Techno-shamanism is a concept, as you said. It is a conceptual world that works with the idea of shamanism, of technique and practices seen as technology. So there are some indigenous people who I consider to be techno-shamanists, like Anapuaka here in Brazil.

Anapuaka Tupinambá has developed a virtual reality project with a video of pajés³ doing pajelança.⁴ You put these glasses on and it is as if you are in the village. By making the indigenous elders part of it, the legacy is left in VR terms. (…)

Of course, in terms of Brazil, it's always difficult to get funding for these things. I personally have a taste for decadence, I like precarious works because I know how difficult it is to do them. So it would be good if more was invested in these works, like those of Anapuaka.

Isabella Aurora I find this question of aesthetic precariousness in relation to the movement interesting, because precariousness is something that scares people and causes rejection. We are used to a finished visual and artistic language, completely exogenous, which I feel comes a lot from places that have (…) a ‘well-defined’ and sellable aesthetic experience. So I think the precariousness refers to the DIY tools within technoshamanism, and these often include knowledge and paths that are Other.

Fabiane Borges Yeah, I agree with you. There is this sublime thing, super well finished, with a perfect varnish and everything fitting together, but which is an oppressive aesthetic for it has no diversity. I think it can be an aesthetic but it shouldn't oppress other aesthetics.

If I were to call someone a techno-shaman, I would mention Germano Bruno Afonso. (…)

He is an indigenous man from Mato Grosso do Sul. He is of Guarani origin and he graduated in astronomy, took a master's degree and a doctorate in France and is a professor of astronomy. He began to dedicate much of his research to the skies of ancestral peoples, mainly from Brazil. He built a mobile planetarium where you discover indigenous astronomy through storytelling (archaeo-astronomy).

Then there are other international artists like Martin House and Jonathan Kemp (…) They got together to give a workshop called ‘Decrystallization’ in London. They decrystallize a lot of computers and at the end the gold components of the hardware are cleaned and sanitized, and everyone drinks a sip of the glass with mined gold. On top of that it makes a symbolic return of the rest of the gold to the Earth. So it's the anti-xawara.

(Dogs barking) the anti-xawara

33:32

Isabella Aurora Why an anti-xawara?

Fabiane Borges Xawara is when the disease, the pandemic invades the world. It comes out from inside the Earth. The dogs are barking, can you see them?

Isabella Aurora Yes. But it's OK.

Fabiane Borges Extracting gold and precious metals from the Earth is like taking the skeleton out of the Earth, like loosening the Earth. From within these holes comes this spirit of the xawara, which is a demolishing spirit that attacks the shamans' chests. When the shamans stop singing, because they begin to die, the xapiris⁵ stop sustaining the sky because they feed off the shamans' singing. And when they stop singing, the sky collapses on the Earth. As the Earth has no structure, it suffocates. It's a catastrophe. It destroys everything that is alive in it. This is the legend of the xawara Yanomami, which is in the book ‘Falling Sky’ by Davi Kopenawa organized by Bruce Albert.⁶

(…) And probably ‘Decrystallization’ is the reverse work. They talk about putting entropy into the system, that we should go through a process of high appropriation of technological knowledge but by disinvesting in the ‘evolutionary’ construction and do that as a deconstruction to go to a point, another place where other possibilities would open up.

Isabella Aurora (…) Spinning in a spiral to try to connect us with people back there makes me think of the concept of spiral time.

Fabiane Borges I had some ideas about technoshamanism also being an experience of time as it is a conceptual world and it is always in process. So people sometimes want to destroy the concept, and the concept has to be elaborated, not destroyed. I don't really know, I remember the idea of the spiral as an alternative to the idea of circularity.

There are a lot of people who think that time is a circle that closes in on itself. The idea with the spiral is one of constant movement and process, like orbits. You don't arrive in the same place, you are always going around in a certain temporal circularity but it is always a movement. It has circularity but it takes you to other places – above, below, further away …

This hole we fell into

42:23

Isabella Aurora To think spatially this concept of time in relation to technoshamanism (…)

Fabiane Borges We are working with the concept of ancestorfuturism. We are aiming at the production of worlds and the production of imaginaries exactly to sustain this hole we fell into – be it the pandemic, be it Bolsonaro. And there is the rest (…)

Regarding the last technoshaman festival, we wanted to pass the ball. We tried to do it in Mexico, we tried to do it in Ecuador. The people there didn't take it because they tried to get the money, but they couldn't and gave it back to us, and the ball is with us again. We will do the festival without money – but not during the pandemic. During the pandemic it had to stop.

Isabella Aurora It brought me back to this wish to think of technoshamanism as a perception of the importance of world creation. (…) Of how the indigenous cosmogonies created our world and created their own worlds through many technologies, and to take this technique as a rescue and a methodology to deal with catastrophe.(…)

Fabiane Borges I think in particular that technoshamanism has always stood a bit on that edge. It is far more borderline than realist. All the experiences that we had with technoshamanism took on a temporality of Tupã, ayahuasca, dreams, fiction, imagination, at least in what we did. (…) It's an internet network, really. That's what TX is.

(…) Techno-shamanism is already born within the context of madness, because it is born out of ecstasy/ecstasy. With the psychedelics, with the crazy DJs, it is already born from the context of contemporary rituals. Updating the ancestral and the futuristic.

Isabella Aurora I think that the Brazilian view of techno-shamanism comes up against the stifling that we experience as artists, as Brazilians and cultural potentialists, which is an invisibility, a lack of access to investment, of having to work on various other things to put bread on the table every day. I think that the movement and what we can make of it also has these loopings and parts of it are disjointed.(…)

The health of the peoples

53:43

Fabiane Borges In this context, now, what would be brilliant would be for us to rescue videos and audios and make them available in a place where people could access them.(…) We could be in a discussion on health, perhaps at the cutting edge, together with the indigenous people. Maybe our question would be what medicines are being proposed now for the indigenous villages.

Isabella Aurora What are the future steps to take with this network, with this concept, this movement? What about the relation of technoshamanism to health?

Fabiane Borges There has been a migration. At the beginning, technoshamanism was very much based on the free software culture and when we started talking about it here in Brazil, around 2005, it came within that context. Then, when things started to degrade and everything started to convert to neoliberalism, the programmes were sold or appropriated by the computer industry and the movement lost the political force it had in the 1990s. All this made TX, when it started to develop in our hands in 2010, change its profile (…) It started migrating to a younger and more artistic crowd. Programmers, technologists, computer scientists, computer makers sensitive to the issue of aesthetics came along, but also performers, documentarists, ecologists, agroforestry producers, and people involved in happenings, family agriculture.

(…) Perhaps my real participation within all of this – not only as an organizer, but as a creator as well – was to introduce the influence of the clinic, of group psychology, of subjectivity, with the influence also of schizoanalysis, of the experience with other cultures, of the creation of new group dynamics.

(…) The health in which we would be entering now would be a broader field. Thinking of indigenous health, the health of peoples, traditional healing practices, medicine. The pandemic disrupted this process a lot, but we are constantly with the village virtually.

Isabella Aurora But it brought urgency, you know.

Fabiane Borges After this business of the Pataxó health post, what I want is to see it ready. The vision of the future, I don't know. Not to give up before the health centre is ready. Everything is slow, far away, with little access, but the Pataxó are organized and making this happen.

There are other people, artists, who have practices. You know some people, don't you? Some artists?

Immigrant spirits

1:02:08

Isabella Aurora I know some who have techno-magical practices. There is a movement here in Europe, since I think the 2000s, a combination of technology and traditional/archaic knowledge critically reimagined as tools. (…) But there are many manifestations between art, magic, witchcraft and technology.

And I also see that everyone who is a migrant here, well, we bring our ghosts. We bring our will and our presence, the presence of our spirits. So it is very funny if we think about the path of the spirits. First there was a migration, a colonization, and a thousand syncretisms were created of the gods that were born and carried in the boats and reborn there (in the colonized countries). Now migration returns these gods but re-imagined, and it makes them come back here where they find a devastated land. So I feel that there is a spectral force here that is very big and terrifying, but very veiled, silenced. That is why I think that this migration and contact between the migrant and the place bring a little bang, a little big bang that is also a feedback loop. (…) I think that other iterations are going to take place with these gods that are coming back.

Fabiane Borges The immigration of the spectres, right?

It’s alive

1:06:05

Fabiane Borges I want to thank you. I thought it was good for us to have this conversation. (…) Of course, one hour of conversation is not enough to know exactly what it's about, but I think we have already been able to give some brushstrokes.

Isabella Aurora But it is a concept so alive and so organic that it can only be touched as we speak. You can't make an A+B definition.

Fabiane Borges (…) People ask for something concrete, but like you said, it is alive and organic, we touch it and it responds.

Isabella Aurora Thinking about the history of the movement, it also makes no sense to talk about a cold concept without talking about people and encounters. Because the encounter is already the movement. Approximations, ‘disapproximations’, then it becomes clearer.

Fabiane Borges I usually call it a network, an internet network, which is updated in real life whenever it happens. You never know who you are reaching. But the pandemic has shown that the virtual world is perhaps our greatest experience of the present for the upcoming years.

The Pataxó are an indigenous people in Bahia, Brazil with a population of about 11,800. ↩
Mutirão: collective and free mobilization of individuals to perform a service that benefits a community. ↩
Pajé: Brazilian shaman. ↩
Pajelança: a generic term applied to the various manifestations of the shamanism of the indigenous peoples of Brazil. ↩
Xapiri is the sacred word the Yanomami people of Brazil & Venezuela use for 'spirit', the Yanomami shamans contact the Xapiri for guidance and to listen to the ancient wisdom of their ancestors. ↩
Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, La chute du ciel. Paroles d’un chaman yanomami, preface by Jean Malaurie, Plon, ser. ‘Terre Humaine’, Paris, 2010 ↩