Indicibile (Unspeakable) is the title of a workshop that was organized with the intention to test a psychedelic compound, changa, with a group of artists that could try it out during a few days, while collectively creating their own setting.
The title obviously refers to something that cannot be told. The experiences arousing with changa, a smokable DMT-infused mixture of herbs, have such an ineffable character that they resist any effort of faithful linguistic transposition. Similar to dream experiences, but of a very different quality, these truly mystical experiences escape the “flattening” of any level of representation.
In the spirit of it, when it came to inviting participants, we avoided lengthy explanations and kept a low profile approach in letting people know the details: we had to be rather stealthy because the workshop implied the use of substances with a complicated legal status and could not be communicated in plain sight.
The workshop had been documented with three instant cameras only, and to keep up with the unspeakable we decided that the three analog films were never going to be developed.
COLLECTIVE ALTERED STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Stemming from the success of this past experience, we felt the need to organize its outcomes through this booklet (see pdf below, written mostly in italian), whose scope is now to set up guidelines for a new workshop on altered states of consciousness, directed to collective self education through art making practices. We envision the participation of artists and cultural workers from different disciplines, coming together to shape an environment that can be activated through experiencing it in an altered state of consciousness.
The intention to propose a workshop based on a collective altered state of consciousness comes from an inner necessity, a deep feeling of living in a heavily controlled, domesticated reality whose
connection to the sacred have been cut off. Our motivations can be somehow expressed through these words by Ram Dass: «We are living in a deprived society, as far as spiritual rituals are concerned. We suffer from a shortage of rites of passage—or at any rate a shortage of meaningful rites of passage. It’s true that we get married and we get buried, we have our baptisms
and our first communions and our bar mitzvahs, but sometimes they don’t seem to touch our hearts very deeply. In the worst cases, they’re just episodes we go through mechanically, by rote.» (Dass 2004)
The next “Indicibile” will be structured around a collective creative process, in which several people will be involved for several days, or even weeks, in imagining, designing, and shaping a setting (the physical context) for a collective altered state of consciousness experience; we believe that this creative process will lead to the enhancement of the individual set (the interior environment) of each participant and in return, the enhancement of the designed set. Indicibile is also the idea of reappropriating altered states of consciousness, for spiritual growth, ecstatic experience and just simply recreational use. We want it to be clear that there is not a therapeutical end in this project; there is the will to share a collective experience, in which we search the way of organizing it from inside, as a group, in doing it, as an act of mutual trust. That’s why we don’t find necessary to have a formal act between the parts, as an agreement in which we define the limits between two individuals. It’s a choice.
