Devices of Divination
With Buhlebezwe Siwani, Russell Watson and Jaasir Linger
Divination, ritual objects and ancestral rites are approached here as practical devices that shape everyday life. Across cultures, people have turned to charms, offerings, prayer, trance and symbolic tools to seek guidance, protection, fertility, healing and contact with the dead. These practices are not simply expressions of belief; they are ways of acting in the world and influencing its course.
Divination offers counsel when decisions carry risk. Ritual objects hold memory and intention. Ceremonies bring communities together to mark change, restore balance or respond to crisis. Through gesture, repetition and shared meaning, these acts create forms of knowledge grounded in experience and relation.
What becomes visible when such practices are understood as technologies in their own right – tools for reading signs, negotiating uncertainty and shaping causality? Placing these devices within contemporary debates about technology opens space to rethink intelligence, forecasting and decision-making in times of instability.
These questions are taken up in conversation with Buhlebezwe Siwani, Russell Watson and Jaasir Linger, whose practices each approach ritual, spirituality and cultural memory as lived, operative systems. Siwani, a performance and installation artist working between Amsterdam and Cape Town, draws on embodied ritual and ancestral presence to interrogate power, belief and the politics of the sacred. Watson, a Barbadian filmmaker and Lecturer in Cinematography at the University of the West Indies, brings a practice spanning cinema, installation and archival work, engaging Caribbean histories and speculative image-making. Linger, a Rotterdam-based artist and graduate of the Sandberg Instituut, works through research into Winti and Afro-Surinamese heritage, translating spiritual and historical inquiry into film and installation. Together, their practices open divination as a field of cultural technology, action and relation.
What else is on Thursday?
Check the timetable to visit more programmes with your Festival Pass (5-days) or Day Pass (1-day). With the passes you can also visit the festival exhibition Techno-Ancestrality at the IMPAKT [Centre for Media Culture] and BAK Basecamp.
Thursday day pass 5-day festival pass
For more information on the festival tickets please see here
Image credit: Adinkra 05 by Russell Watson (Barbados 1973)
