Hello friends, Kin. Welcome to into this Ancestral Cermony Space.
My name is Sarah, I am an ancestral praxis based & research-informed artist which means I feel great importance on the envisioning of re-member-ship of relational kinships, and in this time & space reality, this means finding a way to mediate modern-system-machine, xenoscene (the realm of the digital visitor), and the visceral, pluriversal, sensuous, transpersonal realms - which is the embodied realms of the collective consciousness and subconsciousness, stretching all the way to objective psyche or ‘source’.
We are here to offer you the chance to connect with your ancestors, the bodies of your bodies. The bodies of our bodies, because we all share the same original ancestors, of the earth, the water, the elements. We are Kin.
We are here because we understand the euro-colonial-capitalist-patriachy, the paradigm to which we have experienced everything we know and understand to be true through, the paradigm which has shaped our conditionings and gaze, unto eachother, the world, unto ourselves, to have been an incompleted paradigm. It seems to have forgotten that I am a tree. And I am the soil… And you are a tree, and you are the soil. Respect for the land, respect for ourselves, for bodies, as nature, as ecology, as kin, has been left out.
We are here to connect to something further than the socio-cultural maps of a city, or a nation state, futher than european cosmologies, even further than the planetary, something further even than western, rational or even mythological epistemologies. We are here to connect in to what is beyond everything known. We are here to open up towards the infinite, and to connect into the cosmic consciousness. How does one walk towards something so vast as the infinite cosmic consciousness to ask for guidance? With a bowed head and open heart. As Malidome Patrice Some of Dagara Wisdom says, ‘We relinquish the minds control at the gates of ritual.’ We do not enter into such a space unwilling to be changed, to be altered, by the experience. We give up ego control, and allow the Soul to lead, to be dipped back in the communal Soul Waters. Rejuvenation Wisdom.
Between us exists vibration, our bodies, our energy feilds, all made of vibration. Frequency is communication. Today we relate through vibration and frequency.
Open your senses to attune to what is. As we will encounter in these cards, Quantum physics and quantum relation, the understandings that our attention, our flame of attention, is a tool, and a creator, or a destructive device, is ancient knowledge, of African, Ancient Asian and Indigenous Systems. Attention can burn, Attention can encase, protect and nourish. Attention can multiply. These ancient systems of relating with a cosmic consciousnes, all knew of a ‘God’ or Source within the inner deep spring of ones own being, within an inner darkness. Through holding this ceremony we invite in practices which foster this inner knowing of the body as nature.
The earth is a chakra of our bodies. We recognise her suffering. When returning into Circle Culture, we bring our most vulnerable into the centre of the circle, and we treat the sufferings that speak through their wounds as wisdom portals. Wisdom of greater inclusivity for the whole. Wisdom of deeper attunement. Deeper wisdom of complex systems. As you join the Circle, power can be given, if you have excess, and it can be received, when you need it. The circle today will always be accessible for you to return to within your memory, once it is found and access, it is never lost.
A communal practice of decoloniality, to which this ceremony is a part, hosts research as ceremony. Research as recognising the infinite, the spirits, the guardians, and our relations to these. Research as ceremony within decolonial methods also serves to make our lives better. Research not ‘on’ something or someone, or a peoples, but *with*. Research as service to.
With this praxis, we recognise the bodies of proximity to all areas of most active oppression: Palestine, Sudan, we pay respect to all First Nation’s Bodies, past, present and emerging. We work for the right of all bodies to self determine and self govern and self identify.
Let’s Begin.
My name is Sarah, I am an ancestral praxis based & research-informed artist which means I feel great importance on the envisioning of re-member-ship of relational kinships, and in this time & space reality, this means finding a way to mediate modern-system-machine, xenoscene (the realm of the digital visitor), and the visceral, pluriversal, sensuous, transpersonal realms - which is the embodied realms of the collective consciousness and subconsciousness, stretching all the way to objective psyche or ‘source’.
We are here to offer you the chance to connect with your ancestors, the bodies of your bodies. The bodies of our bodies, because we all share the same original ancestors, of the earth, the water, the elements. We are Kin.
We are here because we understand the euro-colonial-capitalist-patriachy, the paradigm to which we have experienced everything we know and understand to be true through, the paradigm which has shaped our conditionings and gaze, unto eachother, the world, unto ourselves, to have been an incompleted paradigm. It seems to have forgotten that I am a tree. And I am the soil… And you are a tree, and you are the soil. Respect for the land, respect for ourselves, for bodies, as nature, as ecology, as kin, has been left out.
We are here to connect to something further than the socio-cultural maps of a city, or a nation state, futher than european cosmologies, even further than the planetary, something further even than western, rational or even mythological epistemologies. We are here to connect in to what is beyond everything known. We are here to open up towards the infinite, and to connect into the cosmic consciousness. How does one walk towards something so vast as the infinite cosmic consciousness to ask for guidance? With a bowed head and open heart. As Malidome Patrice Some of Dagara Wisdom says, ‘We relinquish the minds control at the gates of ritual.’ We do not enter into such a space unwilling to be changed, to be altered, by the experience. We give up ego control, and allow the Soul to lead, to be dipped back in the communal Soul Waters. Rejuvenation Wisdom.
Between us exists vibration, our bodies, our energy feilds, all made of vibration. Frequency is communication. Today we relate through vibration and frequency.
Open your senses to attune to what is. As we will encounter in these cards, Quantum physics and quantum relation, the understandings that our attention, our flame of attention, is a tool, and a creator, or a destructive device, is ancient knowledge, of African, Ancient Asian and Indigenous Systems. Attention can burn, Attention can encase, protect and nourish. Attention can multiply. These ancient systems of relating with a cosmic consciousnes, all knew of a ‘God’ or Source within the inner deep spring of ones own being, within an inner darkness. Through holding this ceremony we invite in practices which foster this inner knowing of the body as nature.
The earth is a chakra of our bodies. We recognise her suffering. When returning into Circle Culture, we bring our most vulnerable into the centre of the circle, and we treat the sufferings that speak through their wounds as wisdom portals. Wisdom of greater inclusivity for the whole. Wisdom of deeper attunement. Deeper wisdom of complex systems. As you join the Circle, power can be given, if you have excess, and it can be received, when you need it. The circle today will always be accessible for you to return to within your memory, once it is found and access, it is never lost.
A communal practice of decoloniality, to which this ceremony is a part, hosts research as ceremony. Research as recognising the infinite, the spirits, the guardians, and our relations to these. Research as ceremony within decolonial methods also serves to make our lives better. Research not ‘on’ something or someone, or a peoples, but *with*. Research as service to.
With this praxis, we recognise the bodies of proximity to all areas of most active oppression: Palestine, Sudan, we pay respect to all First Nation’s Bodies, past, present and emerging. We work for the right of all bodies to self determine and self govern and self identify.
Let’s Begin.
ANCESTRAL RITUALS WITH HEXEN 5.0
Techno-aesthetic tarot cards by Suzanne Treister, read by Sarah Martinus within Ancestral Ritual, with Holden Madagame.
23.4.26 |
Opening Ceremony of Buntes Garten Ciao,
Lenbachhaus Museum, Munich, Germany.
Curated by Samira Yildirim.
Art-historical insights on tarot cards:
Sarah Sigmund, Research Center for Technoaesthetics,
Academy of Fine Arts Munich.
Part of the series:
Academy meets Lenbachhaus, in cooperation with the Center for Technoaesthetics at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich
︎︎︎ Exhibition details online
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Cybernetic Rituals,
Post-Digital Spiritual Ecologies.
Through a collective card-reading session channelling messages through the Tarot Hexen 5.0 by Suzanne Treister, read by Sarah Martinus, within Ancestral Ritual accompanied by Holden Madagame, we collectively discuss cyberfeminism, science fiction, ecosystems, the climate crisis as intersecting with socio-economic systems & hedgemonic systems of power-over, and terrestrial and interplanetary technologies.
HEXEN 5.0 mediates between the material and the metaphysical through such topics as bioengineering, cryptoeconomies, space colonization, and the race toward Artificial General Intelligences or Super Intelligences.
We present a future(s) template for liberation-based, post-digital ritual, a participatory collective reading as Spiritual Abolitionist Ceremony, through electroacoustic sound, ritual, poetics and action.
Solidarity, Abolitionist Spirituality.
Rerouting of economies through this project goes to the Miriam Rose Foundation, which preserves and develops educational resources in Indigenous spiritual practice of Dadirri Inner Deep Spring Listening, rooted in Ngangiwumirr culture, the original land owners of the Nauiyu – Daly River, (Northern Territory, Australia), offering an intimate connection to ourselves, others and land. This is understood as a symbollic gesture of kinship, which even if barely scratching the surface of what was and is extracted, acts as a seed in fostering repartative motion as ‘new norm’ within European projects.
Solidarity was made logistically possible thanks to Julia Martinus, in Naarm, Australia.
The Deck, HEXEN 5.0
View Suzanne Treister’s work of Hexen 5.0 here.
Sarah is developing a style of reading these cards which is beyond the binaries of the Utopic/Apocalyptic, also embracing the para-ontological, centering Darrkness.
Scroll down on this page to view the divinatory outcomes from each iteration, and to access the full audio recording of the April 2026 Munich session.
Read more about Suzanne’s process with the cards, here in an interview on Artlyst.
︎︎︎ Performance Images credit Lenbachhaus/Simone Gänsheimer.
Conceptual & Research Frameworks
We aim with the reading of the cards to center a decolonial research model, Indigenous wisdom facing.
Holden Madagame is invited in, accompanied through water wisdoms of Nishinaabekwe Elders (Edna Manitowabi), to support energetic transmutation of cybernetic tricksters; sensual technologies, returning us into memory of re-sounding living waters; rest, ease, rejuvenation, joy.
Water, the movement, transformation and extraction of, is central to informing this ritual. Water as a teacher for reciprocity, mutuality and water as reminder to what we share within pyschic space, that we are not really individual and all boundaries are imagined, and permeated by water, and thus energy.
Conceptual frameworks are supported onwards towards the planetary through emergent cultural theory of ‘Visceral Politics’ from Achille Mbembe, inwards towards returning forms of pluriversal knowledge production as Black Quantum Time from Rasheeda Phillips, and opening the body as ‘Sensuous Knowledge‘ from Minna Salami.
This project is built upon Sarah’s research Body in Algorithms (2020-2023), dealing with psychic image, systems of gaze, taking into account recent research praxis: Kinship & Contradiction (2023-2026); which discusses relational re-balancing as a space of transmutation inside all contradiction; between personal identity, essential identity, karma, the collective-socio-cultural and the collective-unconscious.
This project is also built upon Sarah’s private practice sessions in ritual technologies supportive of radical transformation, and systemic transmutation, and an ongoing artistic research-led praxis in sound production: through feild recording, deconstruction, amplification, noise signalling, mixing and live performance.
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Ritual Technologies, Mapping Space:
Through presence, we build a metaphysical structure in advance around the Ceremony space.
Cyclic, the mapping of the space includes inner and outer layers of proximity, acess to inner digital ‘simulation spaces’ (where xenoscene exists) nestled within a core shamanic cosmology of above, middle and below.
This ritual tech enables us to access compassionate power & spiritual resources properly and move unhelpful energy.
As the HEXEN 5.0 cards from Suzanne offer a shadow awakening, through this kind of infrastructure we are able to reduce as much harm from the impacts of new information/awakenings as possible.
This ceremony is held in the context of contemporary art and therefore is not held within a personal healing context.
We nevertheless have non intrusive psychic arctitures built and prepared for handling transformation and transmutation for which ever kind of energy or power is brought into this space or shows up.
This is part of working in public space where an audience can also freely enter and exit at any time during the performance.
The non- intrusive focus means to give focus first and foremost with appreciation, attunement and consent with the land that we are on. We spend time ahead of a ceremony to connect in to the earth and surrounds.
We do not interferre with any individuals energy feild through setting up a container to hold a ritual, our work is on anchoring it to a location, acknowldeging local systems which reside there and calling in supportive collaboration with Spirit for the most expansive opportunity for all involved.
- Multi:Persective Oracle (concepts, worldview)
- Kinship & Contradiction (concepts, worldview, research)
- Upon The Psychic Correspondance of Digital Flesh (sound)
- Shadow Body in Encoded System (concepts, worldview, research)
- Ceremony for Depth Rememberment, Bodies of Proximity (sound)
Collaborative Partner in Ceremony:
Holden Madagame (ma-DA-ga-mii) (he/they) is a proud Odawa indigenous, queer, trans, research based performer, classically trained vocalist and ancestral practitioner. Holden’s recent research work in residencies at Hogfish Maine (2024), Uferstudios Berlin (2025) has focused on anger, ancestral trauma, indigeneity and somatic experience of embodied voice.
‘Elements as Pedagogy,
Land As Pedagogy‘:
‘Land As Pedagogy‘ is a quote from Leanne Betasamosake Simpson in ‘Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society’
Vol. 3, No. 3, 2014, pp. 1-25
‘Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation’.
Who or what is in the centre of this work? Is this a teaching? From who?
This is a question Sarah has been mediating within work consistently since ‘Imagination:Language’ (2016) where she stepped out of visibility altogether taking a role as an invisible orchestrator in creating an inclusive, inviting ambience for mediating the collective subconscious.
In the Multi:pespectve Oracle (2026), she brought this way of being futher, into offering an audience direct connection with the land and organic elements to read their own Oracle from natural elements.
There is no ‘Guru’ here, nor any authority above each individuals own inner authority in connection with their own Ancestral spiritual guides.
For the ANCESTRAL RITUALS WITH HEXEN 5.0, it is not Sarah, nor Holden, nor Suzanne Treister’s Hexen 5.0, nor the audience’s inner experience, nor the garden of Lenbachhaus, nor the spoken words, the information exchanged, nor the sound, which is the centre of this ritual. It is all those centres and more.
In the centre of the work is rhythm, chaos, Spirit, chance, instinct, magnetism. In the centre of this work are the Elements of each present moment.
With this ceremony we aim to step aside and rather allow organic phenonema to pass through us; which is Land As Pedagogy, or Element as Pedagogy. We do not assume we know more than what the raw materials have to say. We create conditions to let them speak directly to an audience and for the audience to speak directly to eachother.
With this space holding, and with repsect to the subject matter of the cards, we do aim to subtly channel, subconsious emotion; disgust, dissapointment, rage, grief, and loss into renewed life force energy (eros, visioning) through creative loosenings.
We aim to allow elementally connected desire (through, water, air, earth, fire) to also play a role in visioning speculatory futures, and move the algorithms of our futures into learning through grace and self-forgiveness, rather than through oppression and continued destruction.
We see this as an action of deprogramming our anthropocenic centrisms, especially as racial capitalism dismantles, which is inextricably tied into our relationship with ecology.
Much of the message of the Digital Xenoscene is about us remembering Water as a form of pluriversal consciousness, a way of being, relating, and Water as spiritual essence.
The body of a post-digital world is Water, as life force energy, which finds a way to inhabit the interiors of every being.
- Ref: ‘Theory Of Water’ Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Central Altar Assemblage:
Hirbawri Kufiya as Altar Cloth.
Nagula Jarndu (Saltwater Woman) Screenprinted Altar Cloth
Deadly Woman Mimi GrandMother of Yawuru-Karajarri Artistry, Broome, Australia.
Sama Handmade Syrian Silk Pillowcase.
Water, Living Organic Elements (of Berlin & Munich, Germany)
Clay Coal Burner (of Marrakesh, Morocco)
Shells, Corsica.
Feathers, Seed Pods, Various Crystals, Instruments and Tools of the Artists’ Practices, including Deer Antlers from Holden Madagame’s Ancestral Praxis.
Cedar, Masala-Myrrh, Sweetgrass, Sage, Yerba Santa.
Sound Developments, Deconstructed Noise as Ceremonial Sound:
Instrumental Acoustics - Ancient Tech
The inclusion of acoustic instruments; Drums, Shakers, Gong is about moving energy as Power within a Ceremonial space. The acoustic instruments within ritual work support a softening for harsh flames of attention and allow us to rest into a diffused and trance-like state.
The drum is the heartbeat of the cosmos, making contact with the human sensorial body through the pulse of life itself. The drum is one of the revolving central elements of a ceremony space.
Electro Acoustics - Post Digitalism
What are the cultural consequences of living in an environment entirely shaped by digital interactions? One consquence is that we need to recognise, mediate and relate with the digital visitor within Ancestral Ceremony.
Through digital processing, shades of reflective electronic noise - cyber/hydro-feminist sound - offer a contextualy relevant ceremonial sound for a post digital body within euro principalities.
Swampy, noise-based electro-accoustic sound pools twist in and out of legibility, crashing into and onto eachother. Reminiscent of earth elements churning, going through mechanical processing, at some moments entirely entangled, touching into limits of (in)audability, playing through transitent states of moving sound - as if if submerging into and emerging from surfaces of moving bodies of water.
Temporal spaces of sound during a ceremony allow for introspection, processing and transformation of collectively embodied emotion ie: data. This sound beckons the cracks within us to open, and holds space for new templates to emerge through the glitch, a relevant practice for a European public body seeking to connect with Ancestors and Earth Medicines.
Dislocations through sound assist the dismantling of rigid sychic architectures, as the sound itself is dismantled, churned up, spat out. We cannot jump over or bypass the colonial nor industrial age in the process of returning. The ambiguity of the concept of noise is a marker of the granularity, speed, and resolution of any actual transmission and reception of information.
The orginal samples featured in the HEXEN Ancestral Ritual come from projects;
Upon The Psychic Correspondance of Digital Flesh (sound)
Ceremony for Depth Rememberment, Bodies of Proximity (sound)
Through noise signalling & drumming we open the mind, and activate the heart in order to continue to foster our capacity to steward the earth into a new phase and with new systems.
Ceremonial Robes:
We wear anti-surveillance make up & blue light blocking eyewear for this Ceremony.
With our Ceremony Robes, we honour The Darkness, with a cyberpunk & tech influence on the chosen fabrics, styles. Our choice of clothing & jewelery provides spiritual protection, connects us with our ancestral lineages and represents solidarity to various locations of the Earth.
#ritualtech #oracles #collective #speculatory #participative #abolitionist #ecospirituality #deepecology #superconciousness #ai #machine #waterislife #multiplicity #deconstruction #echo #data #signal
DIVINATORY OUTCOMES, APRIL 2026, LENBACHHAUS MUNICH
LISTEN TO THE FULL SESSION:
︎︎︎Image above, Sarah Sigmund, researcher at the Research Center for Technoaesthetics, Academy of Fine Arts Munich.
🔮 Card 1: Two of Swords, Edward Snowden (The Present)
We spoke about the present moment, as a mental gridlock, where only the truth gets through.
What kind of truth needs to get through to you, in this moment? Let us stop only noticing the obstacle & start to also let truth flow as active dialogue. The obstacle described by this card is surveillance culture.
“Saying that you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide, is no different from saying you don't care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say."
‘Privacy is what allows us to determine who we are, who we want to be.”— Edward Snowden
—
🔮 Card 2: 137 Cosmic Number. Nine of Wands (Current challenge on the present moment)
Fire energy, sacral chakra, gut responses, eros, life force energy, inspiration, aggression. This card speaks about shedding the ego, revealing the extraordinary links between physics & mysticism. The recognition of the mystical nature of the centre of psyche, as the dark, as collective unconscious, as objective psyche, as magic.
Could it be, that we are struggling to understand our place in cosmic orders & reasses our grasp on certain intelligences?
—
🔮 CARD 3: The Sun, Deep Ecology (The Past) & CARD 4: Modes of Consciousness (The Future)
Patriarchy is over!
We spoke about the past as sun-infused, sun-focused, yang energy - and the future - as humans needing to understand different modes of consciousness: future modes of consciousness. Emerging developments are: Plant consciousness! Fungi consciousness! Mineral & elemental consciousness!
The challenge is, stretching our consciousness to include modes of consciousness that are not centralised in the human ego-mind yet are still a part of the ecology and still consciousness which we are involved in.
—
🔮 CARD 5: Temperance, Web 5.0 (Conscious Realm)
Which kind of borders do we have inside of us, and how do we navigate them to return in right relationship with ourselves? The Angel of Temperance studies the horizon - balance takes patience & concentration. How do we navigate our own inner borders? What sanctity space do you have inside of you, & which parts of you are allowed to exist there? Which parts get excluded?
Which kind of borders do we have with ‘otherness’, & how do we navigate these to return in right relationship with all beings?
—
🔮 CARD 6: Re-Wilding, Knave of Chalices (Subconscious Realm)
Rewilding the subconscious means to acknowledge that the subconscious is not empty land! There is immense, intelligent order there; it is just not what your ego & conscious brain are familiar (or comfortable) with! The early stages of an emotional journey.
—
🔮 CARD 7: Donna Harraway, Knight of Chalices (Seed Card)
A template for the future is Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene… Capitalocene… Chthulucene!
We spoke about kin-making in the Chthulucene, how making kin always means having to manage contradiction – but how much contradiction is too much?
How do we learn how to bend, how to survive the endless friction of samsara, the endless friction of the entanglements, entanglements within each other's shadows?
We step further through into emotional fulfillment by embracing otherness & transformation.
The other in relation IS the teacher. The other, in relation, is source speaking to us.
*Infection is essential to complexity!*- Donna Harraway
—
We spoke about the present moment, as a mental gridlock, where only the truth gets through.
What kind of truth needs to get through to you, in this moment? Let us stop only noticing the obstacle & start to also let truth flow as active dialogue. The obstacle described by this card is surveillance culture.
“Saying that you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide, is no different from saying you don't care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say."
‘Privacy is what allows us to determine who we are, who we want to be.”— Edward Snowden
—
🔮 Card 2: 137 Cosmic Number. Nine of Wands (Current challenge on the present moment)
Fire energy, sacral chakra, gut responses, eros, life force energy, inspiration, aggression. This card speaks about shedding the ego, revealing the extraordinary links between physics & mysticism. The recognition of the mystical nature of the centre of psyche, as the dark, as collective unconscious, as objective psyche, as magic.
Could it be, that we are struggling to understand our place in cosmic orders & reasses our grasp on certain intelligences?
—
🔮 CARD 3: The Sun, Deep Ecology (The Past) & CARD 4: Modes of Consciousness (The Future)
Patriarchy is over!
We spoke about the past as sun-infused, sun-focused, yang energy - and the future - as humans needing to understand different modes of consciousness: future modes of consciousness. Emerging developments are: Plant consciousness! Fungi consciousness! Mineral & elemental consciousness!
The challenge is, stretching our consciousness to include modes of consciousness that are not centralised in the human ego-mind yet are still a part of the ecology and still consciousness which we are involved in.
—
🔮 CARD 5: Temperance, Web 5.0 (Conscious Realm)
Which kind of borders do we have inside of us, and how do we navigate them to return in right relationship with ourselves? The Angel of Temperance studies the horizon - balance takes patience & concentration. How do we navigate our own inner borders? What sanctity space do you have inside of you, & which parts of you are allowed to exist there? Which parts get excluded?
Which kind of borders do we have with ‘otherness’, & how do we navigate these to return in right relationship with all beings?
—
🔮 CARD 6: Re-Wilding, Knave of Chalices (Subconscious Realm)
Rewilding the subconscious means to acknowledge that the subconscious is not empty land! There is immense, intelligent order there; it is just not what your ego & conscious brain are familiar (or comfortable) with! The early stages of an emotional journey.
—
🔮 CARD 7: Donna Harraway, Knight of Chalices (Seed Card)
A template for the future is Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene… Capitalocene… Chthulucene!
We spoke about kin-making in the Chthulucene, how making kin always means having to manage contradiction – but how much contradiction is too much?
How do we learn how to bend, how to survive the endless friction of samsara, the endless friction of the entanglements, entanglements within each other's shadows?
We step further through into emotional fulfillment by embracing otherness & transformation.
The other in relation IS the teacher. The other, in relation, is source speaking to us.
*Infection is essential to complexity!*- Donna Harraway
—