Ayesha Tan-Jones.
Sarah Shin is the founder of New Suns, a feminist curatorial and storytelling project, and co-founder of Ignotia Books, a publisher working at the intersection of technology, myth-making and magic. Building communities, strategies and solidarities is crucial to cultivate hope in uncertain times, and exists at the forefront of Shin’s work. Precarity and risk is routine and endemic – how can it be shared? Shin’s curatorial and publishing practise centres on addressing this question, calling upon collectivity as a practical form of resistance.
Ahead of her curation of the Body Series at Somerset House Studios—with artists including Ayesha Tan-Jones, Roz Kaveney, So Mayer, Lola Olufemi, and Linda Stupart—SLEEK spoke to Shin about sublimating reality with ritual, astrology and tarot. Inspired by an ungendered world in Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Left Hand of Darkness, New Suns bills itself as a celebration of all gender identities and expressions, with performative readings, music, astrology readings, poetry and protection spells and rituals.
Linda Stupart.
Can you speculate on the increasing popularity of astrology, tarot and ritual in our contemporary moment?
Our current place in the weave of time is composed of several threads that contribute to the mass popularisation of these things. The entwining factors of political instability, economic precarity and generalised anxiety have been well referenced by the proliferation of thinkpieces seeking to map the psychic contours of our ‘age of uncertainty’ against the explosion of astrology into the mainstream. But further, the rise of ritual in public discourse, in connection with other esoteric knowledges and practices, brings into greater relief the fact we are an age in search of lost time. According to the poet CAConrad, their (Soma)tic poetry rituals are routes to “an extreme present” in an increasingly mechanised and brutal world that steals time and thus your life, your personal power: “Each ritual is a choice to become and remain present.” Perhaps we’re looking for pathways, tunnels to an extreme present away from ‘the extreme centre’ of contemporary politics, which is constantly shifting rightward, and the narrowing confines of possible reality.
You’re the co-founder of Ignota Books – what space does Ignota seek to fill?
Ignota’s project is to open a space at the intersection of technology, myth-making and magic for this extreme present, invoking Janus in looking both at the past and future simultaneously. Ignota is a meeting of mine and my co-founder Ben Vickers’ thinking and lines of enquiry and is imbued with the shared intention to formulate an experiment in the techniques of awakening through a variety of publications, signs, practices, experiences and strategies with magic as a source of potentiality. Our logo is a moongate, a portal – Ignota is a bridge to personal pathways of exploration, an invitation to go deeper and deeper.
Myth-making, ritual, storytelling are all approaches to creating spaces of possibility
How do political and climate crises affect your relationship with publishing, if at all?
Writers and publishers have always responded to the questions and challenges of the world around, and there’s been a huge response from within the publishing industry to these issues of our time. My publishing practice with Ignota and interest in esotericism begin from a place in relation to the world and moreover a concern with how we world our world and how its “reality” might be reinvented. My relationship to publishing itself hasn’t changed so much as being even more deeply permeated by a sense of urgency for different strategies for an inhabitable future— different stories about our relationship to each other and to nature need to be published.
Ursula K Le Guin describes science fiction as the “mythology of modern technology”. Is myth making a tool we can use in our everyday lives? For example, Ayesha Tan Jones offers self defence classes in London—at New Suns they will be offering a ‘protection ritual’. There seems to be a continuity between the two.
Ignota’s output seeks to provide a survival strategy or toolkit for this time of collective trauma and grief, historical confusion, political pressure and ecological emergency. In what So Mayer describes as “the broken open”, there’s certainly a continuity between the need for practices for psychic protection such as Ayesha’s ritual for New Suns’ Winter is Coming at Somerset House Studios, and speculation and science fiction, which are tools for opening up the field of the possible. After all, myth-making, ritual, storytelling are all approaches to creating spaces of possibility where we can ask ingenious iterations of the question posed by all of Le Guin’s work, as identified by Margaret Atwood, “what sort of world do you want to live in?”
New Suns: The Body Series will be held at Somerset House Studios, London on Saturday 16 November.