KIM SCHWENK 2023

~Video Recordings from the 2023 online VGS are accessible for 30 days from purchase date~

LECTURE: Untimely Ripped: The Ontology of Paper
Paper is born of blood, fire, soil, and water. It is a vessel of the plant spirit. It is product that absorbs the history of the Earth both in content and context. Paper is a pliant chameleon created to capture the essence of knowledge and document an evolving imagination. While the process of paper making is complex, it reveals much about visible culture, including our ecology, economy, and consumerism. What about non-visible culture? To err on the side of mystery, paper is the flesh of a book which has infused the properties of both plants and animals; the binding of a book is the skeleton. In those structures, we sometimes don’t see an embedded cultural formulary or the ritual process of saturation, separating, and sitting, even the ancestral trauma in plants. It is a volatile and resilient material; it retains an alchemical quality. Whether made of animal or plant, paper is a manifestation of composite chemistry and spirit, often overlooked in repertoire of esoteric bibliographic studies and uses in ritual practice.