PROJECT

The School of Magical Politics is a collective research into the narrative construction of society and play, games and poetry as possible sites for modeling political alternatives, different modes of being together. The aim of the school is both to imagine and model ways of being together (politics), that takes into consideration the messy complexity of margins and the uncertainty that lies beyond the horizon – while also engaging critically with the inherent dangers of emergent narrative spaces that are in flux. Magic here is understood as a border zone, a site of possible narrative-shift within reality (things can become other things, things can disappear) it is also always related to the horizon, the unknown and un-seeable.

School of Magical Politics in this sense is a spatial practice, identifying and revealing these cartographies of magic through play. SMP’s goal is to play and imagine ‘impossible politics’ in contact with diverse communities of place and practice – thinking and doing alongside but apart with activism and critical pedagogy. SMP is interested in the playful development of a poetic intelligence that can disrupt powers that impose on, smooth over, restrict access to or perpetuate a chaos inside the narrative landscape of our being together.

The present research at wpZimmer is part of a trajectory conducted between August and November 2021 at & with Living Commons (Cork, Ireland), Panni Vegh (Budapest, Hungary), Floating University (Berlin, Germany), Topoi/WpZimmer (Antwerp, Belgium) and the Department of Theatre at the Babes-Bolyai University (Cluj, Romania) with the supports of the Arts Council of Ireland’s Arts Participation Bursary Award, wpZimmer, Living Commons and Babes-Bolyai University.