- Site-specific cases
Surprisingly, in the midst of the 2020 pandemic, the Roman municipality approved the possibility of drinking Tiber’s water. Due to lockdown protests were mild, we thus assume that such a decision must have come from environmentally friendly, hygienic and curative sensibility; the water is full of pesticides, hydrocarbons, metals and microplastics, but also the leftovers of 3 millennia of fantasmagoria washed out from buildings.
Probably the all-mighty city governance decided to use it for counter illusionist curative reasons, a magnetic fluid as a pharmacon.
Afterall Rome is a key place to understand the trans-historical, architectural and political extent of illusionism and its forma urbis has fooled many visitors throughout centuries. However, due to its hyperreal tourism the city no longer makes sense for the residents and in Covid times it becomes incomprehensibly empty. Isn’t this the right opportunity to understand the Tiber’s magnetic fluid and its curative potentials?
In times of disinformation, rampant conspiracy, charismatic populism, and psychophysical paradigms of dependence of the digital world ESCI promotes illusionism as the martial art of doubt and the form of knowledge most suitable for navigating in the post-truth.
ESCI disseminates and promotes research, practice and the study of prestidigitation in a democratic and open way especially for the uninitiated. The trend towards social transformation engages ESCI in the development of magical strategies destabilizing and never thaumaturgical, relying on the latent revolutionary potential of illusionism.
ESCI investigates emancipatory illusionism. It engages in the development of prestigiatorial thinking by putting it at the service of a new form of political intelligence, guided by the search for alternative thinking, completely denying the conservative and macho imaginary of the stage magician.
For both the initiated and non initiated ESCI is a political school of magic that addresses the causes and effects of contemporary society and investigates the relationship between magic and critical thought through urban phantasmagories, admirable contradictory, magical and anti-magical actions, generating trans-sensory effect of urban manipulation.
