Memories & Mirrors

Service Description

“Secure the shadow, ere the substance fades" touted Victorian death photographers in the days of the early daguerreotype. The silver-coated photo object that in addition to revolutionizing the Western photograph, embodied one of the most public displays of our capacity to hold an energetically-led, talisman-based intimacy with the dead. Part art-historical survey, and part ancestor-veneration study, Mirrors with Memories, is a workshop not only on the materiality and visual culture of early American death photography, but a workshop on our present understanding of how we choose to materialize bereavement today. How we, as witches and spirit-speakers, use (and charge) memory objects to navigate our intimacy with death, dying, and the belief in a continuation of life after death. Prerequisites: none (other than an interest in the intersection between ancestral work, cultural history, and psychometry -- psychic object reading). My Bio: Steven (He/They) is an archivist, folk witch, and practicing psychic medium, who works at translating the stories of our pasts, to help us in actualizing more empathetic futures. While holding a mediumistic practice that is rooted-in and held accountable-to the evidence-based techniques he bears from the Spiritualist tradition, Steven is proud to be workshopping his spirit speak today not only as a psychic, but as a psychic witch who is finding their home within conjure, folk magick, and traditional-folkloric witchcraft traditions. Steven lives in Providence, Rhode Island where he received his BA in Anthropology (from Brown University), as well as his first set of tarot cards (that ended up changing everything).