Folklore,miracles, Site-Specific Spirits

In this workshop, we'll be working as a type of
haunt hunter. We'll first identify the spirits
that haunt our everyday, examining the multitude
of histories and site-specific spirits that
dictate the institutions we join, the spaces in
which we live. Equipped with cameras, we'll
experiment with what it looks like to document the
felt but unseen and the everyday specters as
Jacques Derrida defined as the "visible and
invisible, both the phenomenal and nonphenomenal:
a trace that marks the present with its absence in
advance."

The mindless and hysterical banality of the evil
presented in The Exorcist is the most terrifying
thing about the film... At the end of The
Exorcist, the demon-racked little girl murderess
kisses the Holy Father, and she remembers nothing.
The grapes of wrath are stored in the cotton
fields and migrant shacks and ghettos of this
nation, and in the schools and prisons, and in the
eyes and hearts and perceptions of the wretched
everywhere, and in the ruined earth of Vietnam,
and in the orphans and the widows, and in the old
men, seeing visions, and in the young men,
dreaming dreams: these have already kissed the
bloody cross and will not bow down before it
again: and have forgotten nothing.
-James Baldwin, "The Devil Finds Work"