Necromancing

Like most future-oriented practices, necromancing animates present, past and yet-to-be worlds into volatile patterns of exchange. By conferring with the dead about the tendencies and afterlives of the now, necromancing shares out agency and confuses simpler ideas of the forward. As work, it speaks to the effort and the labour involved in establishing those forms of contact, to the difficulty of registering what comes through and how to receive it. Once that is established and achieved, it flips itself into a future quite easily.

Most cultures and civilisations command technologies that allow for such zones of contact with the not-now and the not-here in multiple directions. History and storytelling are technologies in this sense, film and love are others, variously enfolding and morphing the temporalities and spacings of available present/ past/ future constellations until they offer up new way of inhabiting world.

This should be a given and we should be able to assume that we are continuously in touch with the dead when working out what to do next and what and who might come after. Where that contact is not available, where that connection is severed and where the dead find themselves withdrawn from reach once more and all over again, necromancing offers a repertoire of speculative practices against the horrors of suffocating in a hardened and impoverished version of the present.

Drexciya (1997). The Quest. Submerge (3)

Apichatpong Weerasethakul (2010). Uncle Bonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. Kick the Machine.

Ocean Vuong (2019). On Earth we’re Briefly Gorgeous. Penguin Books.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan (2019). Once Removed. Sharjah Art Foundation.

JJJJJerome Ellis (2023). Aster of Ceremonies. Milkweed Editions.