Editorial
Every beginning is magic and therefore we chose magic as the topic of our first issue. We would like to create a platform where artists and theoreticians equally get a voice and discuss current topics. Too often we see only presented together what has been funded at the same time during a year – we strive for a thematic approach in order to create relations and an awareness for what normally stays behind the scenes. Eva Meyer-Keller says in her interview that certain topics simply seem to be in the air and that it would be nice to bring them even closer together. In Satz we would like to give space to these magical connections, this zeitgeist.
When sociologist Max Weber 1917 coined the term “Disenchantment of the world” the belief to be able one day to explain everything by science was popular. Andreas Tobler describes how in 2014 the rational traceability of the production mechanisms of Romeo Castellucci`s Sacre leads to a paradoxical enchantment. Could one call the belief in complete control and transparency of forces that influence us nowadays as obsolete? Even emotions and creativity are engrossed by capitalist mechanism that we can permeate just as little as the consequences of the interplay of algorithms behind financial transfers. Therefore it is not astonishing that Tobias Rausch is using magic tricks to approach the topic of money in Magic Fonds.
A pragmatic understanding of magic can mobilize alternative, resistant forces as presented by Érik Bordeleau in his text. The shared space of the bodies of the audience gets an urgent pertinence seen in this perspective; when we ritually gather to experience how the human and material bodies merge – as for example in Ingri Fiksdals work that we present in the Making of – then the performance reflects an approach where the common doesn`t mark a nostalgic physical presence but stresses an ethical position. Let the forces speak that start working in the intermediate areas, the twilight zones and gaps.