A certain truth emerges from our inability to trace how beliefs manifest across times and cultures: we are drawn to believing that faith is the most powerful source of reality. But faith doesn't bring us to transcendence, but rather to transfiguration: the alteration of matter and meaning through constraint—economic, emotional, and historical. In this summer of hell, we consider how beliefs, like bodies, are shaped by the systems they inhabit and resist. Everyone is thirsty for a miracle, we claim in our cover, but few ask what this thirst says about the drought we’re caught in.
This thirst also reveals a troubling paradox: we no longer move because of our beliefs. Instead, we remain frozen in place because we cling too desperately to them. This condition is a consequence of capitalist indoctrination, the religious characteristics of which are described by Walter Benjamin in Capitalism as Religion (1921). In the text, he warns that capitalism is the only religion that permits no exit; a cult of scarcity, a liturgy of guilt, a theology of endless extraction. Amid genocide in Gaza, anti-migrant brutality in the U.S., air war against Iran, and a tightening net of identitarian politics in Germany, belief becomes a site of suspicion—a fragile posture more than a force. We cling to belief, not to build power but to survive the absence of empowerment. Under worsening austerity economics, art communities mirror the conditions they once challenged. They are fragmented by funding cuts, fatigued by call-outs, and too overworked to protect the joy that once resisted alienation. The (art)market absorbs critique as flavor. The polarization becomes profitable.
And yet—transfiguration names another register. This issue departs not from ideology, but from a shift in consciousness. It is the shapeshifting fury of Meii Soh’s fugitive bodies. It is Naama Shoshana Fogiel Lewin’s insistence that we abandon the illusion of the indivisible “I.” It is Ruth Patir’s litanies reclaiming birthing from the death drive of state control. It is Alessandro Y. Longo’s unabating “wonder,” which insists on enchantment as a form of resistance to despair.
To stay with the wound long enough to name it—this is transfiguration. The Mothers of Tel Rumeida, Hebron, document survival not for spectacle, but for memory. Pablo Amaringo’s ayahuasca cosmologies—revisited by Verónica Brands—do not offer escape but insurgent clarity. Zoncy Heavenly mediates herself, asserting presence as refusal. Sarnath Banerjee and Cosima von Bonin—each dissolve the barrier between the sacred and the quotidian, the tragic and the comic.
In the marketplace of belief, even miracles are priced. Our contributors insist, however, that the true miracle is not transcendence—it is stubborn endurance: a letter from a worker; a tribunal convened by the community; a museum forced to confront what and whom it excludes. We reflect upon such forms of endurance with Raqs Media Collective, and on the embeddedness of life into labor, as well as how accumulation is not only a capitalist formation, but a sediment left by the passing of time. A resource, rather than a commodity. In Eigentumsformen, Eric Golo Stone drafted a questionnaire through which museums can reflect on their collection acquisition process. It seems to ask what the underlying parameters are, beyond ownership and prestige? Our columnist unifies a choir of atheists. Thus, this issue is not an antidotal doctrine—it is an exercise in difficultation. We borrow this term from the mediation approach for this year’s 13th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (14.06.–14.09.2025). As the conceivers of the program and collaborators on this issue, Jas Wenzel and Duygu Örs share: “Instead of [only] facilitating, a difficultator does not interpret to solve problems or contradictions, but rather creates conditions of encounter, friction, and experience.” Difficultators refuse to hide discomfort and uncertainty.
What does it mean to change form under pressure? It means refusing consolation. It means turning fracture into a method, as suggested by Jota Mombaça. Not magic that blinds, but transformation that burns. Not belief as obedience—but belief as practice, as possibility, as refusal.
In the ruins of consensus, everybody is thirsty for a miracle. But what if we are the site of their making? What if belief, when unfastened from loyalty to power, can again become a tool—not just for coping, but for changing the world? Transfiguration is not a cure. It is a crack where pressure meets form, and something, finally, arises.
With contributions by Octavia Abril, Sarnath Banerjee, Verónica Brands, Clara Brinkmann, Mya Berger, Julieta Colantonio and Mila Tirini, Clemente Ciarrocca and Yanne Horas, Annalee Davis & Spore Initiative, Barbara Debeuckleare and Mothers of Hebron, Sepp Eckenhaussen, Tracy Fuad, Naama Shoshana Fogiel Lewin, Rindon Johnson, Samuel Jay Sangjani Wills, Dalia Maini, Alessandro Y. Longo, Jota Mombaça, Ruth Patir, María Inés Plaza Lazo, Duygu Örs & Jas Wenzel, Lilo Ruminawi, Madlyn Sauer, Charles Sobbs, Eric Golo Stone, Meii Soh, Raqs Media Collective, Zoncy Heavenly, Claire Tancons, Cosima von Bonin, and Lea Kristin Würtenberger.
Impressum / Imprint
Founders / Publishers / Directors
Verantwortlicher i.S.d . 18 Abs. 2 MStV
María Inés Plaza Lazo, Pauł Sochacki
Managing / Artistic Director
Amelie Jakubek
Editor in Chief
Dalia Maini
Project Development & Distribution
Theresa Zwerschke
Administrative Assistance
Selma Louise Christoph
Assistant Editor
Rita Torres
Proofreading
William Kherbek
Online Design
Giorgia Belotti
Layout / Design Issue no. 37
optikom.com
We thank our volunteers:
Louisa Stank, Teresa Mayr, Nanna Kaiser, Hannah Lu Verse, Mika Schneck, Nicole Yildiri
Druck: Die Rheinpfalz
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