After their 2016 essay “Sick Woman Theory” widely circulated online, they published the novel On Hell [Sator Press/2 Dollar Radio, 2018] following a body-hacking Icarus-like protagonist on their way to heaven. In recent times, Johanna Hedva published Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain [Sming Sming Books & Wolfman Books, 2020], a collection of poems, plays, and essays tackling genius and catharsis alike, and installed the solo exhibition God is an Asphyxiating Black Sauce in the ruin of a monastery in the shadows of Alexanderplatz in Berlin. Their new album Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House was released on 1 January 2021 on Los Angeles-based label Crystalline Morphologies and Sming Sming Books. On it, Hedva makes use of their voice and guitar in droning compositions that oscillate between tender rage, sheer violence, and the gray areas in between. Hedva says, the album “should not be easy to listen to,” but embracing its cosmic darkness ought to have the listener emerge a changed person.

Joshua Wicke As someone who is involved in theater, for me there is always a strong focus on presence when it comes to assembly and art making. My feeling is that what glues your different practices together often is that they deal with different levels of absences, or that they are thinking about absences in encounters and assemblies.

Johanna Hedva That makes me think of a couple of things. One is that there was an epiphany that I had as a young person. I remember it really structured how I started to approach art making and my own work. The epiphany was actually quite simple: it was just that I realized that most of the art I really liked or that had moved me was made by either someone who was dead or someone who I would never meet, who would never know I existed. Someone who would essentially be dead to me or be a stranger to me forever. And that I would be a stranger to them, too. I think this just bled into everything I do, it’s in the DNA of everything. There’s a term that I really like called the necrosocial. I don’t know who coined it, but where I came across it first was in the work of Anthony McCann, who is a poet. He discusses how through poetry we are communicating with the dead all the time. And I find that to be true in just about anything like living, like being in the world, all of the dead who’ve now returned to different kinds of matter, but also in the work that they’ve left behind. One of the things that’s always on my mind whenever I’m in a public space is who and what is also present there. Maybe you can’t see it, maybe it’s something we would call absence now. And vice versa. Whenever I’ve had experiences that maybe would be on the spectrum of a mystical encounter with some sort of abyss or void or negative, like a negation of presence. The paradox is that it’s still a presence—I’m still encountering the void. It’s there. It’s not not there. This is something I think about a lot. It’s just the way that I was raised by my mother and my aunt, who are witches. They were always talking to the dead, communing with the dead, asking them for help. It’s like the lamp on the table had a soul and we had to talk to it because it was not behaving well, you know. It was like everything was this sort of animated thing, but it was also not necessarily present in the body or the way that we would normally think of presence.

JW One text of yours deals with a Sunn O))) concert you attended in Berlin and you focused on it being a social gathering and social encounter of sorts, but one “that is not quite there.”

JH […] To me, the two hardest things to write about are mysticism and music. I feel like the reason they’re so hard to write about is because they have this paradox at their core of being present and absent at the same time. You can’t see or touch music. But it’s there and you feel it. It moves, it vibrates through your bones. When I was at that Sunn O))) show, it was a mystical experience, absolutely. The point of the negative quality to Sunn O))) is that you can’t really see them on stage. They wear these dark hoods and there’s no vocals. You can’t see a face making words in a microphone. And then the whole venue is filled with smoke. So, you can’t see anything except for this kind of hazy light around you. And it becomes this really interesting experience to be in a room with a bunch of people all experiencing the same thing. It feels very solitary and people aren’t singing along to the chorus. For me, this also gets into this tradition of mysticism that I’m quite partial to, which is the idea of the “via negativa,” the more apophatic theology, which is the concept that the divine or God can never be an affirmative thing. It’s always a negative thing or a thing of negation. You can’t say God is great. You have to say God is not great. And this is a language problem. Not being able to define God is a failure of humans and shows the divide between the divine and us. Everything has to be this negative, this negation, of what the divine is. That’s where I’m coming from. When you’re talking about presence, you’re talking about not absence, but it’s also a not not absence.

JW That’s maybe a good link to the political parts of your practice. Dealing with institutions that are infrastructurally excluding a lot of people from being there, you told me that you’re usually sending disability riders to the institutions that invite you. Is that also a way to invoke something into presence?

JH It’s about the ways that power and normative institutions produce absences of certain kinds of people. I guess the thing that it immediately makes me think of is this more “undercommons” idea, like the poet Fred Moten and theorist Stefano Harney’s idea of what fugitivity produces. I think of Moten all the time …The first sentence in In the Break: The Aesthetics of Black Radical Tradition, [University of Minnesota Press, 2003] is: “The history of Blackness is testament to the fact that objects can and do resist.” I guess what I’m always interested in is this ideology of having to be in public, having to be a certain kind of body in public, in order to be seen and valued: white straight cis, you know, propertied, abled, all of these things. We construct all of these “identities” into something like a universal subject. I guess my issue is that I don’t really buy that the subject-object distinction is so clean because I don’t really buy the idea of the subject at all being something that’s stable. I mean, it’s just a fantasy. It’s like an ideological fantasy that power has produced. The idea with the undercommons has always resonated with me in terms of an astrology idea: The 12th House. In centuries of astrology practice, the 12th House has always been the most mysterious place. And it’s scary. Different astrologers and cultural traditions of astrology have described it as being very powerful. It’s known as the House of Malus Daemon in Hellenistic astrology, which is the House of the Evil Spirit. It’s the house of the institutions of incarceration—prisons, hospitals. It’s also the place of slavery. In the 12th, they tried to deal with these other places in life that are mysterious, but that also have a lot of power, that are maybe poetic, like sleep or prayer or sorrow, which are also part of the 12th house. I’ve always thought of the 12th House as being an undercommons in a very Moten and Harney way. It’s like there’s a lot of power in there, but we cannot ever bring it up into the normative space of appearances. I guess one of the things that I used to be very concerned with in my work was trying to make a space in this normative place for sick and disabled people and the people who are normally kept out of those places. I was like “no, no, no, we still need a seat at the table.” I guess since then I’ve just moved away from wanting or needing that. The essay that I wrote after “Sick Woman Theory” is called “In Defense of De-Persons” and I think I started to really entertain this other idea. Like: “Wait a minute, what if we don’t need a seat at the table? What if the table doesn’t exist? What if we don’t even want to be there?”

JW I find it interesting, that in contemporary discourses the political metaphors of visibility as a resource of emancipation per se, of transparency, do not seem to play the role they used to play. Instead, there are more and more community and emancipatory practices coming from places of darkness, from underground- and counterculture, from places that are hidden from the gaze of the hegemonic cultures. It’s pretty obvious that the public of the enlightenment was never so lit as it presented itself.

JH Definitely. I think there are two ways of thinking about negative space or the darkness or whatever in terms of a politic. And one is definitely connected to the things I just said about Fred Moten. The idea of Blackness, the history of Blackness is obviously rooted in a very specific racial discourse. But what’s interesting to me about what Moten does and what other people do, like Jared Sexton and the Afropessimists, is they actually start talking about this Blackness, not as a race thing, but as a spatial thing. It’s a place, and it’s mystical, it’s ontological, it’s this sort of nothingness place. I’m not trying to appropriate Afropessimism, divorcing it from its place within a Black radical tradition. But when I first started to read the Afropessimists, I got really excited by this way of starting to think of darkness or negation or the dispossessed as also having some almost aesthetic or basic material quality just as Blackness itself. And then I’m a real big cosmic pessimism fan, too. The other branch of this inquiry of blackness is a consideration of it in terms of annihilation and nihilism and the vast cosmic indifference that we live in (which is also part of the consideration of Blackness in terms of race). I’m just such a Eugene Thacker fan, too. But I feel like some of my favorite musicians are dealing directly with this kind of blackness. Sunn O))) and Keiji Haino, for example. I just can’t even talk about Keiji Haino because I adore him so much. He made a record that’s supposed to be the sound of the galaxy weeping. It’s my favorite record of his, this continual sort of droning. It’s a tonal piece, but to me it’s this not-not-thing.

JW At the beginning of “A Vacuum is Also a Plenum and Both Make Music Make Life” [the text about the Sunn O))) concert], you quote the philosopher and physicist Karen Barad: “Bodies do not simply take their places in the world. They are not simply situated in, or located in, particular environments. Rather, ‘environments’ and ‘bodies’ are intra-actively co-constituted.” What struck me is this idea, that there’s space and relation between entities that are not quite there…

JH Karen Barad is approaching a concern about what objects are. She’s coming at it from a quantum physics position. That quote is from her book Meeting the Universe Halfway [Duke University Press, 2007]. Everything about it is my jam. Her thing is that agency is not a thing that you can have. It’s a relationship and it’s always activated or instituted or constituted—or whatever philosophical word you want to use here—through the relationship between things that we would normally consider to be inert. She means that on a level of quantum mechanics: matter is affected by other matter. This goes against a lot of what we would normally think. To me this is super interesting politically and socially. That’s what I mean: A thing like the table that we’re supposed to want to have a seat at—it doesn’t exist. We have our own table already. We’re sitting at it. And it’s cute, you know. But it’s also something that I think makes perfect sense in terms of magic. The idea of magic is that there are forces and energies and spirits in everything. Basically, the idea is magic. Even if there’s not something that’s animating an object, you can produce that through some sort of ritual, through some sort of thing that instills or weakens or bestows upon this object, some sort of power. One of my favorite recent conversations I’ve had is with a curator in London who is awakening to his magic practices. He’s like all excited about it because he understands capitalism as just a big spell that was cast and that we all are now part of—like, maybe it’s a curse, we’ve been cursed.

JW Another thing that stayed with me was that when we first spoke I used the term vulnerability to describe an impression I had regarding your novel On Hell. And you were like: “Oh, I don’t like this term so much.”

JH Yes, I remember I said that. It just always reminds me of this Ted talk by this white, middle-class sociology or psychology professor, her name is Brené Brown. She’s trying to say we should be more vulnerable and all will be good. But I guess to me vulnerability is just the fucking default. I mean that on a very basic level. One of my favorite definitions of a body is that it’s a thing that requires support. Period. It doesn’t matter what it is, a body of people, an actual physical body that you drag around. This is a Judith Butler definition, actually. I really like the idea that we always start from a place of precarity, vulnerability; that we’re very close to annihilation at any given time. You know, resources are finite. There are really, concrete political concerns to that question of whose bodies are supported and which bodies of people are supported and not. We’re certainly seeing that now in the pandemic, what different kinds of accesses to resources some people have and some people don’t. But then from a very small place inside of myself, when I’m in this via negativa annihilation mysticism place, I’m like: “We’re all barely here.”

JW When you told me about Eugene Thacker and that idea of cosmic pessimism, I found there’s something extremely soothing in that dark ongoingness. That history is still continuing even if we lose our perspective, even if there would only dust be left. That can be a liberating thought. To surrender to that anonymous history of dust and matter.

JH Absolutely. Surrender is one of my favorite words. This is the word I would use in place of vulnerability or care, whatever people want to ascribe to consideration of bodies. I feel like the task that life demands of you, whether or not you acquiesce and consent to it, is to surrender. What’s interesting to me about care as a political thing, is that, caretaker and caregiver, the words, mean the same thing. We always frame care in terms of this debt logic. Like: “I’m going to give you care so then you owe me your resources, like they were depleted because I gave them to you.” This is a very ableist idea. That when you need care that you’re not giving back to society, you’re just taking or whatever. That is bullshit. We are so dependent just on an ontological level. That’s just what we are. There’s no such thing as independence. There’s no such thing as an individual. There’s no such thing as autonomy and the like. One basic fact of life is that you are dependent on other people, on resources, on all sorts of stuff. And I think the only thing that can give you any sort of peace is to surrender to that fact. I guess the one thing that I think about a lot in terms of activism is this: You know, the world is racist and ableist and sexist and all of these things. And we, who are concerned about that, we do our best and we try to do things day to day. But sometimes, I’m like: “this is too exhausting.” I’m going away, I’m going back to the void. But also, I think one of the things that I take as a kind of consolation is that my activism will always fail, it will never work. And I guess the reason why that is comforting to me is that it means that the choice to still do it is predicated upon something other than a reward. It’s like I am going to do it anyway, even though I know it will fail.

JW There’s something theatrical in that. To stay with the trouble as if it could change something.

JH Yeah, definitely. Writing nonfiction is very similar to writing fiction; both are a sort of drag for me. You build this character of the voice of the text, and you think of all the details. Would she wear this bracelet or not? You know, it’s about constructing a character, a voice, that needs to be able to be the representative of that show. For the most recent piece I wrote about the Covid-19 crisis for the online project getwellsoon.labr.io, I had to summon this sort of voice that was bigger and more optimistic than I usually am. And it was really odd to find myself back in that space after not really doing it for a long time. But the thing about that essay is: I would really love if these things were true in the world. And part of that idea of language being what magic is, is the thought of maybe if I write it, it will be true. It’s not true yet. But if I write it, if I put language to this, if I can make these ideas become flesh, then it will be true in the world. No matter what the media I’m working in is, I always think of it in terms of writing because it’s about something becoming embodied in the world. However, fleetingly, it’s about making matter not inert. I think that’s especially true when I’m talking about things like illness, which is, to be frank, really awful, because you have to just get right into the places that feel the most bruised and ugly about yourself. It just strips off any kind of armor you might have accumulated to protect yourself. For me to be able to go there, I have to summon almost like a Goddess to help me. Like, if we were doing witchcraft right now, and I was making a spell for you to get some more money in the year, for example, we would call on some forces to help us out. I feel writing is similar and especially when it has to tunnel into these places of pain and sorrow and the fact of how small you are. I need this, Medusa kind of person to come with me and she’s just screaming in a blood bath. And that’s how I can get through it.

JW Theatre, tragedy, and especially Greek myth plays a huge role in your new book, Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain, too.

JH Yes, the book is a document of a decade of work and it was a decade where I was pretty eaten by performance. So the documents are many different kinds of performances, and they kind of get at the conundrum of documenting performances at all, like: “Isn’t the document also a performance, in a way?” The scope of the performances in the book is pretty vast, too: There’s a piece I did in a white-walled gallery, “Everything is Erotic Therefore Everything Is Exhausting,” which is supposedly still continuing years after, it’s supposed to be still happening now. There is “The Greek Cycle,” which was a series of four plays I adapted and directed from Greek theatre, that took place in nontraditional venues, like my Homer’s Odyssey that happened in a Honda Odyssey being driven around the freeway of L.A. And then there are fleeting performances that push against the question of whether they would even count as performances, but are maybe closer to something like a poem. The audiences of those pieces are animals, or no one except for myself—but of course, the audience is now the readers of this book. I think this all shares the same ancestry as my interest in how messy the absence/presence binary is. Like: “Does a performance need an immediate audience to be a performance?” What about the audiences that witness the work through its documentation, through a story someone tells about it, years after it happened? Doesn’t that mean it’s still happening? Here’s the necrosocial again, too, the communion with the dead, with the past, with a place and time that isn’t now, but into which we are still plugged. I guess I have a promiscuous working definition of performance.

JW Would you say there’s a potential for collaboration within the necrosocial to get through the ruins of a catastrophic capitalism?

JH Yeah, definitely. Maybe the last thing I’ll say about that is that my favorite line in cosmic pessimism is that the optimist thinks that this is the best of all possible worlds and the pessimist fears that this is true. I guess my feeling is that: I continue to try to live in this space where this being the best of all possible worlds, that’s the terror. I kind of try to make an activism with that in mind: this is absolutely an awful place to be. Obviously. But it’s also the only one that we have. At least until we’ve entered the 96% of dark matter that’s on the other side of the universe.