Ines Kleesattel: Learning Witchcrafts as Counter-Disciplinary Arts

In her public inaugural lecture, Ines Kleesattel, professor and head of the Arts and Design Ecucation MA programme at the Institute Arts and Design Education (IADE), explores witchcraft as a counter-disciplinary art.

Witchcrafts are to be learned. For there is neither magical omnipotence nor mastery nor a ›naturally feminine‹ art. But critical speculative witchcrafts actually do matter – in transtemporal response; turning, transforming, sweeping and caring; in crafty un/learing; with witchy wits, anger, lust, pain and desire ...

In her inaugural hex on Wednesday, 25 October 2023, at 6.30 pm in the exhibition room of the HGK Basel studio building, Prof. Dr. Ines Kleesattel unfolds a genealogy of queer-feminist witchcrafts. Together with co-hex Pascale Schreibmüller, she expounds the potentials of a counter-disciplinary hatching that makes maltreated senses of the possible fly.

Featuring W.I.T.C.H.es across different generations (and a hammer instead of a broom), the lecture-performance will reverse witch-defaming myths, amalgamate theory and praxis, and draw protective circles against the forces of dominance, mastery, and discipline.