A is for Andes, Atacama, altiplano, alpaca, ayahuasca . . .
B is for blood, burden, betrayal . . .
C is charm, chant . . .

Ingrid the puma is a contemporary artist, a land artist from the land of Peru. She is a friend of mine. She walks the earth and labours and wonders and wanders and sometimes she makes artworks, concoctions that are spell-bound and binding. Sometimes she sings. You might call her a witch or a shaman or a dryad. I wouldn't though.

[1/huk: magic]

There is no reason to see the esoteric, the magical, the artistic and the sublime as phenomena mystified and quasi-religious. They can be both pragmatic and abstract. They can be brought 'down to earth', mucky and gritty, and maybe have to be in order to function as humans designed them to. We have long, and primordially so, needed to able to calm the wind, call the rain, protect ourselves from dangerous co-inhabitants, divert hazard in our favour, even summon help from sympathetic 'beings' that are not 'normally' in and around us.

In his 1948 book Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays the social anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski sets out an ethnographically-based argument for the presence of secretive and protected practices carried out historically and generationally in society for practical purposes, in agriculture, horticulture, medicinal and kinship rituals, et cetera. Malinowski writes that "The formula is always the core of the magical performance" and "knowledge of magic means knowledge of spell." (Ibid. p.54 i)

Not all do, but some know how to do this thing (you know they do), the knack and techne: to spell, to cast, to perform these actions and these words that oscillate along the temporal and spatial plane of absence/presence, the 'here and now' and the 'there and then'. They know the grammar, the syntax, the lexicon, the contiguity of elements. And those labels are really not metaphors. They are literal and our literacy. Many more of us homo sapiens are savvy and this practice is heart-felt. We just don't know we know. Maybe we should let Ingrid Pumayalla show us the way, lead us in a song or an incantated dance down a narrow twisting path into a secret garden valley as dry as time and as human as death.

[2/iskay: performativity]

This artist seems to me to be able to get 'performance' to 'do' more, which may be a truly positive thing—the 'doing' I mean. Performance art is a tough medium to work in in so far as it often requires documentation, audience/viewer narrativity and narration, and even the challenges of claims of theatricality to be dealt with.¹

Much, perhaps too much, has been said about the Austinian origins of Speech Act Theory and its far reaching influences on how we can understand the cultural consequences of form and context performing meaning, giving agency to the user of word and/or gesture (paralanguage) actioned in the 'right way' at the 'right place' and the 'right time' by the 'right person', All verbal language and social code is in fact functional in its and to a degree this way. Choose the material. Make the time. Mark the sequence. Enter the space. Go.

But what about the performativity of the 'magical language', verbal or not, of the charm or spell? What's interesting here is that we can perhaps question whether, in this instance, when casting (a spell), we are 'sending out' words/speech sounds/phonation that have agency 'in and for themselves'—animated words and animated worlds that can live and can act independently, like universal matter in collision with other universal objects. This is not an idea that traditional semantics would accept. But we are dealing with the nature of nature here. This supernatural power and supra-nature. Quantum language and quantum linguistics? I may feel empowered to have the magic words, the passcode, the key, the encrypted message. But it is the magic words themselves that have the power.

[Kimsa-3: a dream]

I dreamt a reverie yesterday (7/6/2026) that Ana Mendieta and Richard Long collaborated on a project called Meet me in Australia, whereby he would travel (probably mostly walking) from London to Sydney across the semi-circumference of planet earth; she would journey through the centre, a place not unknown to her. Then on their arrival or soon after there would be a panel discussion in the Sydney Opera House moderated by Ingrid the puma. It's only a dream, right?

Roger Orwell
London, June 2026

¹ In relation to this and digressing far from a critique of contemporary art, the adjectival 'performative' has latterly become a pejorative/negative term in media punditry. This is perhaps emanating from the visceral attacks by far right-wing US politics on gender theory and critical theory more widely. (Someone needs to tell Fox News anchors they need to go back to grad school and gen up on the normative/un marked meaning)

© Roger Orwell. All rights reserved. Please do not use without permission.

Author profile:
Roger Orwell is a writer and a tutor at University of the Arts London. He has an academic background in Linguistics, English Literature and Critical Theory with post graduate research in the interstices of Philosophy, Visual literature and Contemporary art.

Abstract
In this text of 2026 the author builds a creative and critical fugue on the work of Peruvian artist Ingrid Pumayalla.