stockholm – Invisible Mirrors

February 22, 2025

VEVE XXX at Fylkingen

I will be making a new ritual floor drawing with my co-creator Roberto N. Peyre at the experimental arts and music venue Fylkingen in Stockholm next Saturday, March 1st. The performance will be accompanied by an immersive 8 channel sound piece by Copenhagen-based electro acoustic composer and sound artist Jean-Louis Huhta (aka Dungeon Acid). We will be joined by Stockholm-based performance duo Dos Oké and Stockholm-based sound artist and DJ Sofia Sainio (aka Sofftronic) for an evening of ceremony, revelry and dancing. You can find out more about the event and buy tickets here.

June 6, 2011October 6, 2011

Art, Possession and The Revolutionary Unconscious

Below is an illustrated transcript of a lecture I recently gave at the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm as part of the Xism show and ‘Pig Party’ event curated by Roberto Peyre to coincide with a major Vodou exhibition currently taking place there. I will be writing about the Vodou show and the discussion surrounding it in further posts. I will also post a transcript of the lecture I gave two days later as part of the ‘Sacred Matter and Secular Frames’ symposium organized by Lotten Gustafsson, Curator at the Museum of Ethnography and the National Museum of World Culture. Continue reading “Art, Possession and The Revolutionary Unconscious”

“Finally an authoritative book on that weird, complex figure of the zombie that delves deep into the dark heart of the matter rather than skating the surface. John Cussans is that rare writer who can bring to bear anthropology, cultural studies, colonial and post-colonial history, philosophy, politics, folk-lore and a love of pulp fiction and film to offer a compelling story about how a marginal superstition from the Caribbean became the defining monster of our times. Prepare for a wild ride that moves elegantly from Hegel and Haiti, via Mesmerism, James Bond, Georges Bataille and Surrealism to Papa Doc Duvalier and Doctor Terror’s House of Horrors, always steadily illuminating a path through a forest of delirious details. A truly marvellous journey.”

Roger Luckhurst, author of Zombies: A Cultural History

“Cussans rejects exceptionalist explanations of Vodou and the zombie to present a nuanced description of those phenomena within the international political, economic and cultural environment in which both the realities and the inventions are situated. This comprehensive work is a must read for anyone wishing to understand more about the destinies of African-based religions in the Americas, and especially concerning the uses and abuses of Haitian cultural phenomena by outside interests.”

LeGrace Benson, author of Arts and Religions of Haiti: How the Sun Illuminates Under Cover of Darkness and President of The Haitian Studies Association.

“No one alive, or – almost certainly – deceased, has thought about zombies more voraciously than John Cussans. While the outcome of this feasting is not pretty, what it has unearthed cannot be laid to rest again. Those who doubt the consistency, deep historical momentum, or global significance of the ‘zombie-complex’ will find all such reservations fundamentally challenged by this troubling book. Subsequent to this meticulous and wide-ranging process of exhumation, it is no longer plausible to deny that an inexterminable anticipation of undead uprising continues to define the horizon of our world.”

Nick Land, author of Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism.