to be possessed | Chara Kotsali

The work “to be possessed” is a solo physical and sound performance that showcases material and aural aspects of a heteronomous DIY archive of “possessed” women drawn from a variety of cultural contexts.

A dancer and choreographer who has also been trained in theater studies, anthropology, and music, Chara Kotsali is seeking to investigate the phenomenon of spirit possession via a broadened understanding of the term. By means of a disarticulated staged ritual, she engages in a trial possession, attempting to bring each of the documentary instances she encounters to life, and calling upon them to reveal their shattering and subversive nature.

Because, as she herself notes: “The possessed body; riddled with holes and manifold, rude and counterproductive, it cedes in an emancipatory and, oftentimes, healing mania. Ever since I was a teenager, I had an obsession with horror movies and especially whatever involved haunted places and demonisms. The idea of a girl or woman talking with many voices, speaking in tongues, spitting her exorcist and contorting her body in extreme ways, instilled in me a sense of fear and gratification. Years have passed and my obsessions have settled in other fields, but the sense that all is “haunted” and all people are “demonized” has morphed into a certainty. Bodies that overflow, that know languages they were never taught of, bodies that step into a danger zone and at the same time become menacing. Bodies terminally outside the self, like forms of experience that defy sufficiency and autonomy of the individual. The genealogy of possessed bodies tells us on the impossibility of perfect solitude and reveals that discourse and writing, deed and conscience, the immaterial and material world are haunted by voices that preceded and voices yet to be born. Compiling an archive of sounds, images and materials, I endeavored to insert different voices in a conversation on the experience and concept of possession by powers that go beyond the individual body, on solitude as a gateway to the spectral presences of memory and thought, on the objects that bear their own lives and, finally, for the “unheard songs,” the unseen music breathing within the documents on stage.”

• Animism is humankind’s most ancient devotional practice, founded on a belief in the existence of spiritual entities that animate the natural world in its every form and manifestation.
• Some notes on two iconic films featuring possessed women. In “The Exorcist” (1973) directed by William Friedkin, the lead actress Linda Blair seriously injured her spine when something broke inside the mechanical bed designed to shake and convulse her body in those scenes where the possessed teenage girl was in the throes of an outburst. In “Possession” (1981) directed by Andrzej Żuławski, Isabelle Adjani is possessed, abandoning both her husband and her lover alike. The film, which in Greek took the title “Miá Ghinéka Demonisméni” (“A Woman Possessed”), was described on release – by a broad range of critics – as a “misogynistic film”. Years later, Adjani herself said that the director was abusive towards her during filming.
• In her essay “The Production of Possession: Spirits and the Multinational Corporation in Malaysia”, the sociologist Aihwa Ong investigates different interpretations of spirit possession episodes among female workers in multinational factories based in Malaysia. Drawing on fieldwork data and secondary sources, the author touches on Malay traditions surrounding spirit possession phenomena, analyzing its gendered aspects, as well as its class aspects within the framework of such capitalist notions as “development” and “productivity”. She speaks of how rural Malay society has contended with the process of industrialization that so violently rearticulated the identities of workers, both female and male, and their experience of time.
• In his book “The Magic of the State”, the anthropologist Michael Taussig reflects on the notion of the state and attempts to elucidate the source from which the modern state (“the state of the whole”) draws its legitimizing power. By means of a labyrinthine intellectual journey, he exposes the correspondence between traditional, magical spirit possession rituals and the functions of the nation state. The art of spirit possession is analogous to the art of the state. It is through constructed origin myths, sacred founding figures of a race, and contrived collective narratives that the state colonizes the bodies and minds of its citizens, insinuating itself into every manifestation of social and political life. This is how the state is everywhere.