(Photos: Patrick Stuart, Scrap)
In Nottingham we visited the Museum Of Curiosities.
It boasts "haunted items from around the world", gathered via its owner's "paranormal investigations and his contacts within the world of the macabre".
Mummies, tools from Victorian morgues, dybbuk boxes. Basically: goth Halloween kitsch.
Besides a shelf of "spell kits", I took no photographs, inside. I have to admit I was unnerved.
Back home, a collection claiming to exhibit cursed items would have been quite serious. Displaying a command of ilmu; an institutional mastery over spiritual entities. It would feel keras.
Here, in the secular UK, it is some dude's prodigious collection of spooky memorabilia. The prop puppet from Saw sits amid a classroom-photo's worth of haunted dolls. (Patrick's thoughts on the Museum are nuanced and worth reading!)
One doll caught my eye. Propped on a desk, red, clown-like---surrounded by a shrine of letters. Wall text explained the doll's name was Tommy:
"We are not going to give out any information about the effects he has on the living ... if you do get affected in any way and it continues
you can write a letter to tommy to ask him to stop affecting you"
With the museum's address appended.
Tommy's letters spilled over and were tacked onto the facing door. Some were in Arabic. Signed greetings from all over. "We believe in you Tommy!" "You are very nice." "We all love you very much!"
Were these genuine petitions to Tommy, so he'd stop haunting them? Or an ironic, impromptu museum guestbook?
Whatever the case: people seemed sincere participants in this letter-writing ritual; in juicing Tommy up; in saying they believed his story.
In paying tickets of their attention to make him realer.
In mid-March 2025, it came out that the century-old Dewi Sri Pathrakaliamman temple---a small place of worship in downtown Kuala Lumpur; built in 1893, predating Independence---was slated to be demolished.
Jakel Group, a textiles and property-development corporation, was staking their claim to the temple's land. Jakel intends to build a shiny modern mosque, in its place.
Lawyers and activists came out in support of the temple. Jakel explained they had purchased the site from City Hall; it is unclear how City Hall had ownership of the site in the first place.
Eventually things were "resolved"---the local Hindu community agreed to have their temple moved to a nearby site; Jakel will build their mosque, as planned.
A frustrating resolution, in a Malaysia riven by ethnic and religious supremacy. In a different time, in a better Malaysia, the temple need not have moved.
("People sleep in tents, ministers sleep in mansions." Image source)
The truth is that situations like these are pretty common. Kuala Lumpur's face is ever a-blur: old communities and edifices making way, often against their will, for towers and glass; malls, condos, mixed developments with rooftop pools.
Under the Torrens system, City Hall gets to decide who owns what land. And City Hall has always been developer-friendly, if not developer-bought.
How many low-cost flats and semi-rural kampungs and "squatter" communities fall before the diggers of the wealthy? How many of their disappearances go uncommented on, or are waved away in the name of "progress"?
The Dewi Sri Pathrakaliamman temple became a national story is precisely because it is a temple.
And while religion often devolves into fascism or communalism, it is nice to have a god on your side, if you are up against Mammon.
I've been thinking about shrines a lot, lately.
Shrines as play. I built a shrine to a crocodile god, in a gallery show about TTRPGs.
Shrines as memory. Sharon's Portal work is a performance piece, fire ceremony, and photo posters permanently installed at a Port Dickson beach to remember two beloved mangrove trees.
In the popular Malay cosmology, geographical features both natural (trees, termite mounds, mountains) and man-made (mansions, highways, museums) are often inhabited by penunggu---literally: "waiting entities"; in other words: "guardians".
Datuk kongs, earth deities worshipped by Chinese communities here, whose shrines dot the landscape throughout the Archipelago, are a kind of penunggu.
Worship of a datuk kong usually begins with a dream. The deity appears to a local in a vision, and commands them to build a shrine.
In 2018, after a spate of homophobia and transphobia in the news, Sharon dreamt of a sea goddess coming out of the sea, wearing the rainbow colours of the queer flag.
In obedience to Sharon's dream I wrote her datuk into a short story.
If the same dream came to us today, maybe we'd be more confident in our convictions, and build a shrine to this queer goddess in our town, for real.
("Tree Shrining", Gabrielle Bates)
I was once told that Australian governments are obliged to consult Indigenous communities before approving any development plans.
And since the most features in the landscape are imbued with history, with stories, with ecological and cultural meaning, development always happened slower than developers liked.
Honestly? This is how it should be anywhere.
Much of Australian artist Gabrielle Bates's work is about challenging gentrification and community-shattering urban change. This is explicitly a magical practice: "Artist-as-Witch".
Beginining 2016, her practice of tree shrining, the artistic and ritual investiture of trees with divine and magical significance, has been performed around Sydney.
It was also enacted in Kuala Lumpur, as a way to reify an otherwise dour and conventional protest action, to save the Taman Rimba Kiara forest park.
Turning trees into small gods---does that protect them? I don't know. I think it gives them attention. An opportunity for devotion.
Taman Rimba Kiara survived.
On Saturday 22 March 2025, at Bonington Gallery, as part of WEIRD HOPE ENGINES, I was on a panel with Chris Bisette and Laurie O'Connel and David Blandy.
We are tabletop roleplaying game-designers. "Game Design For Planetary Survival" was the subject we were meant to discuss.
I was very nervous about speaking, and panicked, and forgot what I wanted to say. (I spent my time waffling on about my hometown, mostly.)
(Photo: Bonington Gallery)
You cannot have "planetary survival" without a relationship to place.
Late capitalism has become really good at keeping us "un-placed"---digital ghosts drifting frictionless through the world at the speed of a map app's "x hrs away" estimate.
"Globalised" (meaning: rootless) beings are easier to atomise into units, commodities.
How can we claim to have a handle on any sort of material reality if we skip over the material realities where our actual bodies live?
Placedness, rootness, localness. Gradual relationships to your immediate neighbourhood, your specific landscape: the trees on your street, flowering in season; the history of the bus you take daily; the habits of animals in your municipal waterway.
As game makers and players we are pretty good at imagining stuff. We play with secret histories, strange magics, odd gods, alternate futures. We are already good at creating shrines to such things, at our tables.
Why not make shrines, IRL?
What is the genius loci of your landscape? What memorial can you build at the entrance to your neighbourhood? What spirit lives in your favourite tree? What is an appropriate votive offering for the fish-god gestating in the canal; the engine-god in the car you drive to work?
We are very good at immersion, at playing as if things were real.
So make it real. Speak to your trees, aloud. Let your neighbours see. Leave candles at the memorial you made on your roundabout. Build an altar to birds. Cast spells at a protest rally.
Because attention is devotion, and devotion is attention. If that dark god Mammon, whose name is Capitalism, has seized speedy, frictionless materialism---deliberate animism is radical.
Have relationships with the gods of your life, your community, your stories. Build shrines to them. Focus on them. Make them real. Make your place real.
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