Tales of Superstition and Magic III

LUMA Arles presents the third edition of Tales of Superstition and Magic, a three-day symposium bringing together artists, researchers, and writers to explore the connections between magic, care, and consciousness. Moving between history and contemporary artistic practices, it examines how mystical traditions challenge established ideas of knowledge, reality, and power.

Throughout history, rituals, divination, and esoteric practices have offered ways of understanding the world, seeking healing, and confronting the unknown. Yet these traditions have also been marginalized, persecuted, or redefined by the scientific, medical, and political authorities. In the nineteenth century, experiences once associated with witchcraft were increasingly classified as psychiatric disorders, notably hysteria, reinforcing mechanisms of social control. The symposium explores how art, scientific imagery, and visual culture have shaped the boundaries between reason and belief, legitimacy and exclusion.

Today, artists are reclaiming magical practices not as nostalgic alternatives to modernity, but as tools for reimagining humans’ relationship with nature, invisible forces, and one another. In a world marked by ecological crisis and political uncertainty, ritual and artistic experimentation offer alternative perspectives on care, memory, agency, and transformation. During the symposium, performances, conversations, and experimental formats will bring these questions to the fore.

The symposium also considers the increasingly complex relationship between mysticism and technology. Artificial intelligence, virtual worlds, and altered states of consciousness challenge familiar definitions of perception, intelligence, and human experience, reopening questions traditionally associated with philosophy, spirituality, and the occult.

Rather than setting magic in opposition to science or belief to reason, Tales of Superstition and Magic explores how these systems of thought intersect and transform one another. Magic emerges not as an escape from reality, but as a way of questioning who defines it, whose knowledge matters, and what remains beyond the limits of the known.