Hannah Rose Stewart & Blackhaine Present: MIASMA (Excerpt)

In an original commission from Trauma Bar Und Kino and Fact Magazine, concept artist and 3D designer Hannah Rose Stewart and musician and performance artist Blackhaine present MIASMA, a haunted world of lost souls, abandoned spaces and egregores.

An ‘egregore’ can be defined in various ways. An occult concept dating back to the 16th-century Enochian magic of John Dee and Edward Kelley, egregores were understood to be angelic beings, watchers of earthbound civilisations and the ancestors of the Nephilim, mysterious beings of gigantic stature that are written about in the Hebrew Bible. An egregore can also be understood as a non-physical entity, or thought-form, created by the conscious or unconscious will of a group or community, whose emotional and energetic focus imbues the entity with autonomy and the power to influence. Defined variously as an energised astral form, the result of communal will and visualisation and as a symbolic pattern, the concept of the egregore lends itself eerily well to the hyperstitional meme magic of our contemporary multi-platform mire, a strategy for thinking through the increasingly esoteric and atomised communities, complete with their own multi-user shared hallucinations, that break off as the result of the dispersion and entropy of the platforms we once mistook for a digital commons.

For Hannah Rose Stewart and Blackhaine, the egregore is also the spectre which haunts and is embodied by MIASMA, their ambitious and enigmatic multi-disciplinary collaboration stretching from Berlin’s foremost exploratory art space, Trauma Bar Und Kino, to the algorithmically compressed space of the screen. At once a visceral live production and an intricate digital environment and performance space built in Unreal Engine, MIASMA is enveloped by what Stewart describes as “socially imbued feelings of loss, ghosts, magical realism and the uncanny in post-industrial society,” chasing an egregore formed from the “architecture, ephemera and history of the working class in the North,” as well as death drone, the Japanese dance theatre of Butoh and abandoned urban simulation as seen through the eyes of philosophical horror writer Thomas Ligotti.

“Through the virtual and the choreographic, MIASMA autopsies the post-industrial urban corpse, carves out and meditates on its wounds in unparalleled catharsis,” says Stewart, “an embrace with a dark simulacrum that’s intimate, melancholic and abrasive.” Parsing through the entrails of this non-place, one of many sites of the most egregious hollowing out via the tentacles of capital, we can catch glimpses of its true nature, shards of mirrored glass protruding from internal organs, glinting back the familiar from within the abject flesh of the haunted. “We must also recognise the extent to which the capitalist dystopia of 21st Century culture is not something that was simply imposed on us,” writes Mark Fisher. “It was built out of our captured desires.” From a now empty chest cavity there springs a new entity, an intoxicating miasma, a cold and empty portrait of our captured desires shone back at us, presented as abandoned architecture for us to chase ourselves through. In this contemporary Gothic mode the present is irrevocably ruptured by the eternal creep of the past, all signs of life extracted, leaving Hannah Rose Stewart to map its ruined landscape and Blackhaine the only one left alive to speak its name.

MIASMA was originally performed at and commissioned by Trauma Bar Und Kino, curated by Madalina Stanescu and featuring music from Rainy Miller and Croww. The above excerpt is a new commission from Fact, elements of which were presented in Issue 04 of Fact Magazine alongside original poetry from Blackhaine.

For more information about Hannah Rose Stewart and her work you can visit her website and follow her on Instagram. You can find Blackhaine on Instagram and Bandcamp.

MIASMA Credits:

Video, installation, & performance Presented at Trauma Bar Und Kino on October 12, 2022.

Curated by Madalina Stanescu
Credits – Hannah Rose Stewart & Blackhaine
Photo Credit – Lengua
Principal Filmography, Production UE5 – Filip Setmanuk
Editor – Marco Stoltze
Motion Capture – Samuel Capps
MOCAP Cleanup – Anastasia Holumbovska
3D Asset Creation – Lucas Hadjam
Lighting Design – Felix Ward
Music Production – Rainy Miller
Music Production – Croww
Choreographic Performance – Louis Ellis
Graphic Design – Jordi Theler

Special thanks to Kyle Van Horn & The Trauma Bar Und Kino team