A short text written for Dexter Barker-Glenn’s exhibition Soul Manifest, curated by Marie Ségolène and exhibited at Espace Maurice in Montreal, Canada, from 30th November to 21st December 2024. Dexter’s press release can be found here, and a French translation of my text can be found here.
Anthony of Padua, the patron saint of lost futures, tends to his garden of earthly delights. Leaves once green are now the colours of fire. Summer is over.
Raking up all that has been lost, Anthony sets a bonfire for all vanities, and in the flames, sees visions of kaleidoscopic cornucopias, the reddest of plenties.
There is nothing to fear. Let us break bread. Let us drink to get drunk. Our sheaves of rye will grow again, from Europe to the Levant; now is the time of a counter-agriculture.
As a monk of the Franciscan order, Anthony sought the construction of a new form-of-life; a new form, a new configuration, for the multitude: a living-in-common, a love without possession, a monastic communism – the highest poverty.
But in the garden, Saint Anthony’s Fire soon spreads. It is a disease that takes its name from those most adept at curing it. It is the pharmakon, both remedy and poison. It is the mould that breaks moulds; the rhizome that ravages structure; the pathology that breaks the paradigm; the brightest blight.
In the Middle Ages, the fungus ravaged the peasantry. Its effects were double-edged. First, the peasants fell out of their minds, beset by carnivalesque convulsions, raving madly; before long, they were oedipalized, as the poison reduced every limb to a club. Endeavouring to heal all those suffering, the Order of Saint Anthony burns out the fiery rot. Fire meets fire. The circle closes.
Centuries pass. The circle is perforated. Saint Anthony swaps the garden for the lab, and in his petri dish, regrows lost futures. Magic is extracted from the material. Ergot revelations are separated from its oedipal devastations. The psychosis of old gives ways to a new psychedelia.