About

Lucky Rituals examined animist rituals based on my own practice of the Afro Brazilian and Indigenous Brazilian ritual artform Capoeira Angola over a decade. It developed a theory of semiosis primarily based on Eduardo Kohn’s view of multinatural perspectivalism which he outlines in How Forests Think (2013), which views the sign as an interface across orders of consciousness and temporality associated with beyond-human agency.  I demonstrate how this posthuman view of semiosis is descenced from Jacques Derrida's conception of différance. 

I develop this discourse into a theory of Lucky Aesthetics, which is performed in animist rituals—understood as séances between the human and beyond-human order—and thereby propose a theory of art which is oriented by beyond-human forms of signification and semiosis capable of deconstructing anthropocentric value systems. 

My interests and field of research is characterized by the posthuman turn in philosophy and the environmental humanities, which seeks to acknowledge the agency of beyond-humans and their contribution to the social construction of our collective reality. Inspired by my research and experiences of animist ritual, I essentially argue that art practice can be reimagined as the site of this beyond-human negotiation of meaning, which is furthermore, exemplified by the food-chain. I contextualise this outlook in preindustrial belief systems associated with animism, and take up Val Plumwood's conception of philosophical animism presented in The Eye of the Crocodile (2012).