Burning Matters: Rituals of Remembering and Reimagining

Burning Matters is a participatory performance project developed as an artistic response to the permanent exhibition on early modern witch trials at the Jeseník Museum (Czech Republic, 2025).

Rather than extending the exhibition through interpretive or didactic commentary, the project positions itself as a living counter-space: a collective process that engages historical material through embodied, social, and affective practices. It asks not only how histories of persecution are remembered, but how their logics of accusation, exclusion, and silencing continue to operate in contemporary social life—and how these patterns might be reworked through shared presence, dialogue, and imagination.

The project emerged from sustained local engagement, including focused historical research, conversations with the museum’s historian, collaboration with a local sound artist and choir, and listening sessions with residents of Jeseník. These encounters revealed a recurring tension within the region: a landscape shaped by layered histories of displacement and cultural fragmentation, alongside a widely articulated sense of historical rupture. Despite the density of historical events, many inhabitants reported feeling “having no local history.” Burning Matters responds to this paradox by proposing mythology not as a fixed inheritance but as a collective, present-tense practice—something that can be consciously authored through participation.

The work takes the form of a participatory performance comprising three interconnected stations that engage mind, body, and imagination. Participants are not positioned as spectators, but as temporary communities formed across age, gender, belief systems, and social backgrounds. Through structured yet open-ended formats, the project cultivates attentive listening, dialogue, and shared vulnerability as methods of social inquiry.

Difference is approached not as a problem to be resolved, but as a productive condition for collective meaning-making.

A central component of the project is an embodied practice of resonance. Participants are guided through simple yet precise techniques of synchronised breathing, humming, and vocal vibration. These practices activate the body as a site of knowledge and relational attunement, fostering a sense of collective presence without requiring consensus or uniformity. Voice functions here not as performance, but as a shared medium—countering the historical silencing associated with the witch trials and reframing sound as a communal technology of care.

The participatory process culminated in two public moments: an open-air performance and a collective gathering in a church space. The latter foregrounded shared singing and vocal resonance, integrating earlier-developed practices. Textual outcomes from card-based dialogues—statements, reflections, and fragments of newly imagined narratives—were read aloud as a collective poem. This act symbolically reintroduced contemporary voices into a space historically associated with moral authority and judgment. Through sound, breath, and shared speech, the project sought to temporarily shift inherited atmospheres of fear and division toward care, curiosity, and collective authorship.

Ultimately, Burning Matters approaches the witch trials not only as a historical subject but as an ongoing social condition. It frames mythology as a relational and living practice and positions creativity as a civic capacity rather than a specialised skill. By inviting participants to imagine, voice, and sense together, the project proposes that more inclusive ways of living are not merely abstract ideals but embodied practices that can be collectively rehearsed.

About the Stations: Methodology

Mind — The Card Oracle: Remembering Through Dialogue

The Mind station takes the form of a poetic card-based encounter, situated between oracle, archive, and social provocation. Drawing on themes of accusation, healing herbs, ritual, and modern echoes of judgment, participants are invited to draw a card and engage in a guided reflection and exchange process. Structured through the 1–2–4–All method, the experience moves from individual contemplation to shared dialogue in pairs and small groups.
The cards act as thresholds rather than answers—opening questions about fear, care, silence, resistance, and belonging. Participants are encouraged to trace how historical mechanisms of accusation and exclusion continue to resonate in contemporary bodies, relationships, and social norms. Each group produces a small offering—a sentence, drawing, poem, or question—which becomes part of a growing, ephemeral archive displayed on site. In this way, reflection is transformed into collective authorship.

Soul — The Mythical Creature: Reimagining Folklore Together

At the Soul station, participants are invited to collectively imagine and give form to a new mythological being. Drawing from personal intuition and shared conversation, these creatures emerge as guardians, companions, disruptors, or healers—symbols of what communities might need now rather than what they inherited from the past.
This station responds directly to local reflections on fragmented histories and the absence of shared mythology. By co-creating new beings, participants practice narrative agency: reclaiming the right to imagine protective, inclusive, and caring figures rooted in the present. The creatures—sketched, described, or spoken—become speculative folklore for the future, grounded in collective desire rather than fear.

Body — Voice as an Instrument of Care

The Body station centres on voice as a shared, embodied practice. Through guided breathing, humming, and simple vocal resonance exercises, participants learn how to attune their bodies to one another through synchronised sound. No musical training is required; the focus lies on sensation, vibration, and collective presence rather than performance.
This practice responds to histories of silencing associated with the witch trials, transforming voice from a site of danger into a tool of care and connection. The sounds developed here serve as the basis for a communal chant, later carried into the church space. Through resonance, participants experience how bodies can hold, release, and transform inherited tensions, thereby activating sound as a medium for collective repair.

Together

Across these three stations—Mind, Soul, and Body—Burning Matters unfolds as a rehearsal for another way of being together. Cards, creatures, voices, and fragments of speech form a living archive that does not preserve the past as fixed memory, but reworks it through participation, imagination, and care. Friday’s encounters lay the groundwork for Sunday’s collective culmination, in which these elements reappear as shared voice, text, and ritual.




Curatorial Statement

Burning Matters is a participatory performance project developed as a critical and embodied response to the Jeseník Museum’s exhibition on early modern witch trials. Rather than extending the historical narrative through representation, the project activates history as a lived and relational force—one that continues to reverberate through contemporary social structures, bodies, and collective imaginaries.

Rooted in site-specific research and sustained dialogue with local historians, artists, and residents of Jeseník, the work emerged from a shared recognition of historical fragmentation and the absence of a cohesive local mythology. Jeseník is marked by layered histories of violence, displacement, and cultural overlap, yet many inhabitants articulate a sense of disconnection from these narratives. Burning Matters addresses this condition by proposing that mythology be understood as a collective, present-tense practice rather than a fixed inheritance.

The project unfolds as a participatory ritual comprising interconnected stations that engage the mind, body, and imagination. Through facilitated dialogue, poetic prompts, embodied voice practices, and collective myth-making, participants are invited into temporary communities that cut across age, belief systems, and social backgrounds. These encounters foreground listening, resonance, and co-creation as tools for social attunement and care. Central to the work is a shared vocal practice—synchronised breathing, humming, and singing—that activates the body as a medium of connection and transforms voice from an expressive act into a collective instrument.

A culminating gathering in a church space brings together the project’s sonic, textual, and relational outcomes. Reflections generated through participatory exchanges are read aloud as a collective poem, while shared singing reclaims spaces historically associated with judgment and exclusion. In this moment, grief, division, and inherited harm are not erased but held, transformed, and reimagined through collective presence.

Burning Matters positions itself not as an exhibition to be observed, but as a rehearsal for another way of being together. It asks how histories of persecution continue to shape contemporary forms of exclusion, and how embodied participation, play, and imagination might open pathways toward more inclusive, relational futures. The work affirms that the creation of shared narratives—and the responsibility for shaping them—lies in the hands, voices, and bodies of those who gather.