Sylvia Wynter writes that “a ceremony must be found” — a demand to invent forms of meaning-making adequate to worlds structured through racial-capitalist violence and the overrepresentation of “Man.” Taking this as a starting point, in conversation with Hartman’s incentive for waywardness, this contribution proposes thinking through the ceremony.  This Ceremony is an experimental exploration: a ritual-as-rehearsal built from raw materials and autoethnographic experiences from my PhD fieldwork on whiteness in contemporary wellness and spiritual retreats (in the global south). While such retreats present themselves as spaces of healing, care, and transformation, they remain embedded in long histories of extraction—of land, knowledge, bodies, and spiritual practices. Wellness is approached not only as an object of critique, but as an ambivalent site where desire for alterity coexists with neoliberal self-optimization, colonial logics, and epistemic violence.

Rather than presenting a singular ritual, the performance unfolds as a ritual-as-rehearsal: a theatrical reflection and embodied research presentation that moves through ceremony as method. Drawing on practices such as cacao ceremonies, breathwork, gestalt therapy, and contact dance, the work engages these forms through mimesis, translation, and misalignment. Ceremony here is not a destination, but a passage: a way of wayfinding when established critical languages no longer suffice. Moving between meditation and manifesto, ritual, theory, and play, the work asks: what kinds of sacredness are made possible—or foreclosed—when ceremonies are relocated, stripped of cosmology, or reinserted into domestic, over-commodified spaces? In this hybrid I intend to examine how retreat cultures stage “healing” while remaining wrapped-up and entangled with (dynamics of) (Neo)colonialism, imperialism, and extractivism. Rather than approaching wellness solely as an object of critique, I treat it as an ambivalent contact zone where desires for transformation and relationality coexist with neoliberal self-optimization and epistemic violence. Aiming for a wayward knowledge creation, I propose a performative method of “re- appropriating appropriation,” refusing authenticity as strictly here/there. Participants are invited into the in-between to test how Ceremonies can become wayward—interrupting extractive ways of seeing, registering epistemicide without reproducing spectacle, and rehearsing alterity beyond “authentic” tropes toward more accountable modes of being.

Facilitator Bio: Laila van berge (1994) is a visual artist & academic researcher. Driven by a fascination for the spiritual and the supernatural, the myths of modernity and the search for meaning in contemporary culture. Laila's praxis focuses on exploring new forms of mundane magic and secular sacredness. With a strong DIY mentality, Laila moves into a field of belief and desire, working in an eclectic and chaotic technique and aesthetic to constantly interact, mutate, and transform the symbiosis of the material and imaginary. Currently, Laila is a PhD candidate in comparative religious studies at the Radboud University. In this research project, they explore the relation between spirituality and whiteness within wellness retreats. By thinking through and with wellness, Laila aims to understand its potential to subvert and/or subjugate to the mainstream metaphysics of Modernity. Laila is curious to understand how these retreats can become places that perpetuate predominant systems of social inequalities as well as how they might be able to open up routes to alterity.