Faith can move mountains, they say. Metaphorically, it expresses that just about anything can succeed if you just believe in it hard enough. This follows a neo-liberal logic that ties the blame for failure back to the individual. Had you believed or hoped just a little more, the narrative goes, something might have turned out differently. For disadvantaged fates without agency, this clearly sounds cynical.

Still, I’m much interested in the connection between hope and (magic)matter.

In what ways can hope affect matter? And is collective hope more powerful in this regard?

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When I was 15, I spent a year as an exchange student in Sedona, Arizona. The Red Rock desert landscape is an extremely fascinating area, quite magic, no wonder that Max Ernst lived there for a few years. Back in the nineties, the New Age movement was very present in Sedona and I still remember my host father‘s story that these „weirdos“ actually believed that one of the mesas could levitate just by the presence of sufficient hope and faith practiced in meditation.

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When I think about situations that produce immediate and intense hope directed at matter, turning points and tipping moments come to my mind: a car in a movie, for example, hovering half over the abyss and swinging back and forth a little, immediately creates a tension that activates my complete hope energy.

Perhaps in tipping moments it becomes visible how little the necessary energy needs to be that decides a thing one way or the other.

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spuk, talisman, amulett, entrichtetesgeld, magicmaterialim, newmaterialism