UNBINDING

Dissolving Conditioning & Interrupting Systems

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UNBINDING is a ritual process of interruption: a deliberate dissolution of conditioning, internalised systems, inherited aesthetics, and productivity logic so that other ways of being and making can emerge.

I. THRESHOLD — Consent to Unknow

(30–45 minutes)

• Temporarily delete or mute one dominant feed, influence, or reference system in your life for the week. Resist explanations and replace these with symbols, gestures or diagrams.
• Create an alternative workspace in a place where you wouldn’t normally create art - a bathroom, a kitchen. Make it purposefully minimal - a corner, a wall, a cushion. 
• Form an altar by adding one found object to the space. 
• Open the space with an incantation.

Incantation - Mind releases, Unfastening, Undone, Unknown. An opening. Heart speaks.

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II. SOMATIC INTERRUPTION — The Body As Archive 

(Daily, 20–30 minutes)

Eyes-closed free movement without music. Move against your habits: if precise then be messy, if fluid then be angular. Isolate sound, pressure, temperature, rhythm and disrupt. What knowledge exists in my body, unbound?

Design 3 sonic states using only your body to make sound. Prompts: invocation / negotiation / release. 

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III. MAKING AS MISCHIEF — Undoing with the Trickster

(Daily 2–3 hours)

Alchemical and medieval texts, fragmented and occult, require recursive reading, slow assimilation and visual thinking because of their nature as deliberately oblique with encoded traditions.These works may only be understood through their cracks, damage, rumour, partial transmission as they have been largely lost or surviving in part only. These conditions force invention, care, and humility in not knowing. Like the Japanese art of Ikebana, the beauty is in the absence, the spaces in between rather than the form itself. The fragment itself becomes the form: a technology of incompletion.

• Herrad of Landsberg, Hortus Deliciarum (12th c.)
  Much of the manuscript was destroyed; what remains is mediated through copies and reconstructions.
  
  
• The Greek Magical Papyri (PGM) (2nd c. BCE–5th c.)
  A messy archive of operative spellwork, syncretic gods, recipe-rituals, fragmented instructions.
  
  
• Sappho (7th–6th c. BCE)
  A poetics of eros and cosmology arriving as shards.

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Spend 20 minutes drawing or sculpting with your eyes closed. End each session by destroying part of what you have created - pull, squash, tear, cut - and place the remaining fragments on your temporary altar. Pay attention to what remains. 

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Create False Artefacts:

• A Glossary of Made up and Misused Terms - disrupt conditioned language by adapting existing words and assigning alternative meanings or making up new words and meanings.‍
• A Fragmented Symbology - consider what symbols have organised your life without permission? Create a new symbolic system that represents the unspeakable.‍
• A Speculative Protocol - for a world without authorship, ownership and productivity metrics. What kind of future refuses conditioning, homogeny, speed, and extraction? ‍
• Carrier Bag Archives - find small ‘carrier fragments’ throughout the week (e.g., petals, rocks, receipts, plant matter, audio snippets, breath counts, doodles). Form a carrier-object (a pouch, box) to hold these fragments. Write a story about how these carriers find themselves, their relationality and co-existence. ‍
• Heresy Engine - Collect every original thought or concept you’ve generated this week and produce a counter-concept that dissolves it. Create a mechanism that holds both without resolution, such as contradictory rules for a game.‍
• Oracle Diagram - Create a rotating wheel with 12 segments and assign terms (e.g., agency, burden, kinship, decay, signal, soil, consent, dream, error). This can be digital or analogue. Spin daily. `For each landing, generate a micro-ritual prompt of no more than 3 minutes. Archive these outcomes as sensations, not interpretations.

• Place all artefacts on your altar as they are made. 

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Guiding ghosts:

Hélène Cixous’s writing from what has been silenced rather than sanctioned.Leonora Carrington’s refusal of rational containment.
Ursula K. Le Guin‘s world-building.
Marguerite Porete’s provocation of contradictions.
Hilma Af Klint’s cosmic diagrams. 

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IV. RE-ENTRY / OFFERING

Returning Without Explanation

Closing Ritual

• Reclaim your temporary workspace by dismantling the altar.
• Give half of your artefacts and fragments away to people and bury or burn the others.
• Return your found object to a new place, different from where you found it.
• Stand with your legs hip-width apart and relax your knees. Shake your whole body for 9 minutes, consciously letting go of your learnt unlearning.
• Incantation to close the space: I am Unlearnt, Unknown, Unbound.
• Integration: Wait 48 hours before creating new artwork.

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