Olivia Wünsche

New State of Equilibrium is a visual interpretation of my years-long spiritual quest and psychedelic adventures. A sense of deep connectedness and unity, unbounded love for the natural world, longing for peace and transcendence are central themes I tried to visualize throughout this project.
By emphasizing the simultaneous presence of the visible and of the unseen, I want to question and investigate the mechanisms and limitations of our cognitive and sensory perception. Both visual experimentations and the theoretical research contained within this book, are attempts to challenge the secular, materialist worldview which still seems to reign in our Western culture.

When looking through the spiritual eye, or the third eye encased within the human mind, one can see vividly beyond the ken of human eyesight, beyond the material atom, and into the future, thereby transcending the limitations of time and space.

Alice Coltrane

The utopian thinking of the counterculture was vitally important as a way of imagining another, better life, or a different way of living. Not the existing everyday life, but rather a newly imagined life... Liberated from things such as technocratic social repression, racial and sexual oppression, conventional capitalist notions of ownership and individual property.

Andrew Blauvelt

The earth cannot move without music. The earth moves in a certain rhythm, a certain sound, a certain note. When the music stops the earth will stop and everything upon it will die.

Sun Ra, «Space is the Place»

New State of Equilibrium

Anyone who has had an experience of mystery knows that there is a dimension of the universe that is not that which is available to his senses. People living in the world of nature experience such moments every day.

Joseph Campbell, «The Power of Myth »

Everything in creation speaks, but human beings have never learned to listen; they don’t know how to listen to the sun or the trees, the rocks or lakes or mountains; they don’t know how to listen to the birds or, even, to their own inner voice which is constantly speaking to them.

Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov, «The Book of Divine Magic»

All of creation is a song of praise to God. Love abounds in all things, excels from the depths to beyond the stars, is lovingly disposed to all things.

Hildegard of Bingen

New State of Equilibrium

Among the condemned there were women who had achieved a certain degree of power in the community, working as folk healers and midwives or exercising magical practices. […] The witch trials were the means by which women in Europe were educated about their new social tasks, inflicting a massive defeat on Europe’s lower classes who needed to learn about the power of the state to desist from any form of resistance to its rule.

Silvia Federici,«Witch-hunting and the Fear of the Power of Women»

Magic has always been an element of Witchcraft, but in the Craft its techniques were practiced within a context of community and connection.

Starhawk, «Spiral Dance: a Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess»

The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change. For women, this has meant a suppression of the erotic as a considered source of power and information within our lives. We have been taught to suspect this resource, vilified, abused, and devalued within western society. On the one hand, the superficially erotic has been encouraged as a sign of female inferiority; on the other hand, women have been made to suffer and to feel both contemptible and suspect by virtue of its existence.

Audre Lorde, «Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power»

The serpent was the one who brought sin into the world. And the woman was the one who handed the apple to man. This identification of the woman with sin, of the serpent with sin, and thus of life with sin, is the twist that has been given to the whole story in the biblical myth and doctrine of the Fall. The idea in the biblical tradition of the Fall is that nature as we know it is corrupt, sex in itself is corrupt, and the female as the epitome of sex is a corrupter.

Joseph Campbell, «The Power of Myth»

New State of Equilibrium

I became familiar with certain limits of the rational gaze. It tends to fragment reality and to exclude complementarity and the association of contraries from its field of vision...The rational approach starts from the idea that everything is explainable and that mystery is in some sense the enemy. This means that it prefers pejorative, and even wrong answers to admitting its own lack of understanding.

Jeremy Narby,«The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge»

The Old Religion, as we call it, is closer in spirit to Native American traditions or to shamanism of the Arctic. It is not based on dogma or a set of beliefs, nor on scriptures or a sacred book revealed by a great man. Witchcraft takes its teachings from nature, and reads inspiration in the movements of the sun, moon, and stars, the flight of birds, the slow growth of trees, and the cycles of the seasons.

Starhawk, «The Spiral Dance: a Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess»

Mystical experiences often result in attitudes that threaten the authority not only of established churches, but also of secular society. Unafraid of death and deficient in worldly ambition, those who have undergone mystical experiences are impervious to threats and promises.

Alan Watts

New State of Equilibrium

Vortex

Viméo

As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear-headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.

Max Planck

Vortex

That which is below is like that which is above, and that which is above is like that which is below, to perform the miracles of one only thing.

Hermes Trismegistus

As Above, So Below

A tendency that is suspicious and skeptical of domination, authority, and hierarchy. The core of the anarchist tradition is that power is always illegitimate unless it proves itself to be legitimate. And if they can't justify that authority and power and control than the current system is illegitimate and it should be dismantled and replaced by something more free and just.
The burden of proof for any exercise of authority is always on the person exercising it. Most of the time these authority structures have no moral justification, no justification in the interests of person lower in the hierarchy, the environment, the future, the society. They’re just there in order to preserve structures of power and domination and the people at the top.

Noam Chomsky, «On Anarchism»

Burden of Proof

This Equilibrium is the great root from which grow all the human actings in the world, and this Harmony is the Universal path which they all should pursue. Let the states of equilibrium and harmony exist in perfection, and a happy order will prevail throughout heaven and earth, and all things will be nourished and flourish.

Zisi (Kong Ji), «The Doctrine of the Mean»

Rewilding

Nature Simulated

The word art, as I understand it, comes from the Sanskrit word Rta that comes from the Rig Veda, the first writings of Vedic philosophies. The word means the dynamic process by which the whole cosmos continues to be created virtuously. That continual diversification and expansion of energy- in Hindu Vedic philosophies this is typified by Shiva Nataraja. It’s lord Shiva doing the dance of creation and destruction. It’s the two things, and they come together constantly. It’s interesting that in European translations of the Chinese, we’ve got Yin and Yang, separating male and female, but it’s not, it’s YinYang- resolving the difference. They’re not separate, they come together, always.

David Haley, «Along Ecological Lines: Contemporary Art and Climate Crisis»

Form Chaos, Order

When we look down at the earth from space, we see this amazing, indescribably beautiful planet. It looks like a living, breathing organism. But it also, at the same time, looks extremely fragile. Anybody else who’s ever gone to space says the same thing because it really is striking and it’s really sobering to see this paper-thin layer and to realize that little paper-thin layer is all that protects every living thing on Earth from death, basically. From the harshness of space.

Dr. Edgar Mitchell

The Overview Effect

Stencils have a long association with rebellion and punk. The punk movement used stencils because they fitted the general DIY philosophy. The adoption of the stencil worked as a reference to utilitarian and military style, which punk appropriated to subvert symbols of authority.

Tristan Manco,«History of Stencil Graffiti»

In more open systems, street art enables various entities to lobby for their interests. Street art, in essence, connotes a decentralized, democratic form in which there is universal access. And the real control over messages comes from below, the grass-roots groups.

Lyman Chaffee,«Political Protest and Street Art»

Graffiti challenges the world saturated with high-priced corporate imagery: billboards, fly posters and advertising. Street-art was always an expression of the counterculture movement. Within all graffiti activism there tend to be both destructive and creative forces.

Unknown

Public Eye

The Psychedelic Experience is an illustrated manual based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, written by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert. The group of authors had a significant role in defining the collective consciousness of 1960s counterculture youth. Their life-long academic research offered an insight into the therapeutic use of psychedelic drugs. These synthesized teachings of Tibetan Buddhism can serve as helpful guidance through different stages of the psychedelic experience.

The Psychedelic Experience

With the coming of the modern era, a new reductionist worldview emerged. One of its central dogmas portrayed the cosmos as a senseless machine, with other forms of life as passive gears lacking feeling or consciousness. According to this view, all of the interconnected systems of natural complexity could be explained through the study of their separate building blocks. The assumption that Nature is intrinsically senseless and inanimate, valued only for its commercial profitability, served as a powerful justification for its long-lasting, pervasive exploitation.
Contrarily, most of the Indigenous spiritual traditions and eastern philosophies emphasize the sacredness of nature and interdependence of all beings, reminding us of our profound unity with the Cosmos.
Anima Mundi is a trans-media project which aims to reconcile human and non-human, indigenous and civilized, emotion and reason, science and spirituality, male and female for only then will we be able to rid ourselves of the idea of dominating nature and fulfill our promise for acting as a moral, rational, and creative force in natural and well as social evolution. ( Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom)

Anima Mundi

An anthology of essays on the Negritude movement founded by Aimé Cesaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Damas. The framework of literary critique emerged as the counteraction to the long-lasting oppression imposed by the french colonial system. Having gained a global voice of peaceful opposition, the movement aimed to honour the heritage of ethnic, cultural and intellectual identity among the African diaspora in colonial setting.

Native Land