Header Anllel
25 May 2025

Fabulating Spells

PUBLIC WORKSHOP | 25 May 2025 | 13.00-16.30 | Studio, Wereldmuseum Amsterdam

Please join us for the public workshop “FABULATING SPELLS” by artist Anllel Maria that is part of our workshop series “There is Nothing to Fix. You Just Have to Let it Rock". This series is curated by artist Raoni Muzho Saleh and invites us to become familiar with our rage and grief as a source for personal and collective power to create liberatory change.

FABULATING SPELLS

In this workshop we will dive into speculation and fabulation as liberatory technologies, dramaturgical tools that open up third possibilities and -what if- wonders. We will collectively compose nonverbal spells through a musical voice ensemble: A raw, intimate practice that dives into the affects and effects of voice—sobbing, breathing, screaming, murmuring, gasping, swallowing, layering, harmonising and disrupting. Based on the poetics of the power of moving each other's waters, we will research the alchemic forces that live in sound. Sound we create and we give meaning to. Through crafting amulets, writing, co-regulating nervous systems, imagining and collectively composing we will create an ephemeral ecosystem in which we will chant spells as a ritual practice of hope, rage and cleansing.

No experience is required, all ages are welcome.

Please register below for the upcoming event “FABULATING SPELLS”.

Photo credit: Gergely László Ofner

About the workshop series “There is Nothing to Fix. You Just Have to Let it Rock." 

Embodied solidarity as resistance. This is at the center of our new workshop series titled “There is Nothing to Fix. You Just Have to Let it Rock." We organize this community collaboration with friend and artist Raoni Muzho Saleh. Raoni chose this quote by artist and writer, Martin Prechtel as the title of the series to signal what is at the core of it; “feeling your emotions by being rocked by them instead of dispossessing yourself from your human experience by way of fixing your emotional turmoil”. The main theme Raoni chose for this series is the transformative power of rage and grief. Not only as emotions and responses to the world that we feel individually, but as necessary for our ability to create collective, liberatory change. He gave the first two workshops of this series titled "Connecting to our Rage as The Eternal Fire Within: Stewarding our Responses and Responsibility to the World” and “Connecting to the Grief under the Rage”, which introduced the connection between the personal and political dimensions of grief and rage. Next in this series are workshops by the artists he invited, A.E.Z. Pinay, Anllel Maria and Laima Jaunzema. Their workshops will take place on May 11, May 25 and June 14 respectively.

We are happy to announce that one of our research fellows for this year, Dr Yanique Hume, will also contribute with a workshop (date to be confirmed). The series will close with a public conversation about the transformative and political power of grief and rage in June at Wereldmuseum Amsterdam. We will share more about the upcoming events in this series and how you can sign up for them in our future newsletter and website soon. 

This program is inspired by the conversations we had with our collaborators in 2024 - Rethinking Wellness and Communal Embodied Practices specifically– in which we looked at ways to decenter thinking and working with the body from the notion of individualistic self-actualization. Instead we put the focus on imagining communal embodied practices as a necessity for our individual and collective awareness of the political and social climate around us, making it possible to build community and affect change collectively. This year we build on these moments of collective reimagining with the interactive workshop program “There is Nothing to Fix. You Just Have to Let it Rock." It is one of the community collaboration projects we do at Research Center for Material Culture that are an evolving practice of creating space for the creative agency for members of historically marginalized communities in the museum.

About Anllel Maria

She//They

Marika// Migrant//2000

Anllel Maria is an Ecuadorian/Lebanese based in Amsterdam.

A Transdiciliplinary artist with their practice based in Performance/Making.

Through the politics of Ecofeminism and the dramaturgical lenses of Magic realism and Creaturism Anllel creates atmospheric theatrical landscapes usually diving in topics related to land, alchemy and ritual through sound, movement and installation/sensorial images.

Inspired by the notions of non dualism they research matters such as non verbal communication (Electromagnetic camps and mechanical waves) and non linear time (liminal spaces-in betweens) that has become tools and content in her creation processes: An attempt of de-colonising the relations one has with time, language and absolute difference.

She approaches making as a healing technology through the pedagogies of fabulation and somatic practice(s) as important tools for collective liberation.

Anllel Maria

About Raoni Muzho Saleh

Raoni/Muzho Saleh is a Hazara Afghan artist using performance, installation and the sound of mourning moaning to twist and reshape narratives of (cultural) becoming. His work's focus is to play with fugitivity, by not settling on a rigid form. Applying movement and sound as a Raoni Muzho Saleh transformational kind of poetry, he searches for how to continuously be something else, something strange. His practice is engaged with the entanglement of body, spirit, politics and love within art. Through the use of materials such as movement, voice, text and textile he makes works that temporarily immerse both audience and performers in otherworldly thinking feeling and relating.