A Conversation with Alice Sparkly Kat, on the Occasion of her participation in POPPOSITIONS, Brussels, Belgium, by James Scarborough

"Alice Sparkly Kat is a queer astrologer of color with four years of experience in individual consultation, lectures, workshops, and writing. They use astrology to speculate on the ways culture inhabits biology. To them, astrology is a process of imagining the cultural alien through the metaphor of outer space.

This work has inhabited MoMA, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Hauser and Wirth. Their Astrology and Storytelling book (for sale on their website) is a workbook where readers write a work of fiction based on what the sky looked like at the time and place of their birth. Follow them on Instagram at @alicesparklykat for memes and other ephemeral content or read through their website at www.alicesparklykat.com for astrological lessons, articles, worksheets, and other resources."

Alice is participating in this year’s POPPOSITIONS.

(Also interviewed were Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk, Artistic Director, Dries Segers, artist, and Freek Lome, Founding Director of Onomatopee Projects.)

JS: What is the working process behind the work that you will show at POPPOSITIONS? Its starting point, for example.

AS: My books Astrology and Storytelling and Planetary Alignment for Mental BLISS (which launched this past April 10th) will be available and $20. Astrology and Storytelling came from community-oriented workshops that I’d been doing about using storytelling to build networks of validation and self-witnessing in a qtpoc community in Brooklyn. I just put the materials together in a book so that people can do the exercises themselves or build their own storytelling circle from them.

The worksheets in Planetary Alignment for Mental BLISS ($30) have been on my website for a long time, available as PDF, and I redesigned and printed them into a coloring book. The idea for the worksheets is that a big part of working with mental illness is about naming delusions, anxieties, and depressions as social and historical problems. When the nebulous emotions that happen throughout the day are self-narrated, they reveal your political condition. The worksheets try to build a framework for people to explore a process of working through mental illness that doesn’t define it subjectively, biologically, or individually but collectively and in a politically responsible way. All the worksheets are structured according to astrological events.

I’ll also be taking orders for T-shirts, which come from some astrology memes I made using the 1997 Fuck the World format (short sleeves $25 and long sleeves $30 plus shipping).

You can also book a reading with me (sliding scale $100-150). I’ve been doing the readings for about four years and the best way to think about them is like therapy. The reading is more like a dialogue between you and yourself that I facilitate using your natal chart (a symbolic map of the sky from when you were born). We start from your specific experiences and what you’re going through, discussing archetypes from it. What you won’t get is me telling you who you are or what your destiny is, because it’s not my job to overwrite your emotional reality. Rather, it’s a counseling session where we use astrology instead of science as cult.

There will also be some drawings on sale for a higher price range. You can take a look and buy some. The more you buy, the more I’m able to do discounted/bartered readings for people who find my money rate inaccessible.

JS: You are gloriously articulate, perceptive, and profound in your writing about art, morality, and culture. This, for instance, from your essay, vulnerability and artists:

To commodify - to create a desire for which the filling of that desire leaves it more empty and gaping than it was before. It is the narration of a thing without description to the context of how the thing is isolated, divided, named, and extended. For example, it is the mystification of the artist without a struggle to elaborate on the moment someone decides to be one, the price of materials used for art, the entry into the academic art world, the departure from the academia, the decision to never depart from academia, the expense of living in urban centers where the presence of art inflates real estate, the positioning of an artist from these centers.

Are you an artist first or a philosopher? Or is there no real distinction?

AS: Wow thank you! I can’t believe you found this because I myself had forgotten I’d written it a long time ago. I sort of remember it from when I was working in retail and really depressed.

I’m an astrologer. That means that I definitely have an ideology of how I use astrology and what I think it means. I take to heart Adorno’s critique of astrology as a pop ideology that supports totalitarianism. Western astrology’s influence is fully complicit in the rise of the West and its colonization. Everything that is meaningful about it is is meaningful because of the traumas of western culture. I believe that trauma creates meaning and that the trauma of modernity, along with the meaning it creates, is created by what is erased and forgotten. So, the meaning within astrology is white supremacist but that is also true of art and philosophy.

The reason I choose to be an astrologer is because the format of the work allows me to counsel people. It allows me to theorize for people and not institutions, in therapeutic sessions where the point of ideology, the naming of unnamable things and the telling of stories, is oriented towards healing. I don’t choose astrology because it’s a more morally pure ideology but because it offers this format. Somehow, when I'm faced with one face I ask a lot more accountability from myself. That’s the animal brain in me. In more institutionally validated cultural sciences like art and philosophy, that intimate sense of accountability can disappear.

So, as an astrologer who tries to decolonize, I try to remix and misuse the ideologies that already of this world. I don't think decolonization can be realized through a nostalgia of a world pre-colonization or for a world without the memory of it. I think that as people who have survived, we have to create culture with the memory of survival.

JS: Can you trace a trajectory that your work followed to this present moment that is POPPOSITIONS? What are its constants?

AS: I started doing chart readings after being interested in astrology for a while. I got out of a really bad relationship and astrology helped me through it so doing it for people was a natural next step. I became more invested and decided I wanted to try to make it into something I could do full time.

My relationship with astrology changed after I was learning it from doing readings. It began as such an esoteric language to me and along the way I started realizing how irresponsible esoteria is, because it takes power away from people and gives it to the occult. Me trying to reimagine astrology as a political tool is me trying to subvert the power of the occult, or hidden, down a more responsible path. I'm attached to astrology because queer community is invested in it and it gives us language and channels for humor, growth, and connection.

I really just started doing chart readings for my friends and they weren’t good for the first year or two. Even now I’m still learning. They make me grow so much because each person is new and I’m a beginner at learning each person. I posted horoscopes at a coffeeshop, got picked up by a magazine, got involved with community projects and did some astrology workshops there. That gave me what I needed to do Astrology and Storytelling as a course, which I turned into a book. I did more research. I have a project two years in the making I’m hoping to finish this summer. I made some memes and put them on social media. I gossip with my friends with astrology and we critique its colonial history. Some institutions asked me to do some stuff with them and so did some corporations. The readings still center me in my mission and my commitment is to improving how they can benefit the psyches of marginalized people. That’s pretty much my trajectory.

JS: In a prior interview, Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk, POPPOSITIONS Artistic Director, wrote most of the participants have submitted proposals and project that are address being woke and wokeness, verging from the notion of the human body as living currency, identity politics as lifestyle attribute, to discussions concerning feminism, queer, gender, blackness, migration, and post-colonialism. In terms of subject and process, how does your work for this project embody this wokeness?

AS: I never use the word woke because it’s not my word to use. It’s part of black vernacular and, as an Asian American, I completely lack the cultural context to feel its full implications and the emotions it conjures up. I will say that, as an observer, I saw this word come up a lot through activist movements to bring people together, then saw a lot of white celebrities and corporations appropriate and commodify it. That makes this word pretty American and I mean that in a cynical way.

What I can talk about is how what I do fits into America, and I mean an America that has a corporate democracy built on marketing power. A lot of what I do is talk to people about their subconscious or the sleeping parts of themselves. Consciousness is an important imaginary, because it takes us places, but part of the reason why is because we have so many forms of hypnotic media. There is a part of my work that is about bringing political consciousness into the sleeping, the ghosts, and the traumas that haunt us as a culture.

I do the readings because I believe in the work, even when they’re not perfect. Addressing mental health issues as political issues through astrology has made me grow. I learn from my clients. We reach satisfying conclusions about traumas and life journeys together that psychotherapy isn’t built to address. It’s what I want to do.

The economic equation is ugly. I end up charging my community and 2/3s of that goes to my landlord. I have to commodify the readings and turn them into things people can buy. I feel generally dissatisfied by how I have to charge for healing. But it is emotional labor that I provide, and I have living expenses. If I made more money, I’d be able to provide more free stuff but right now I make on average between 1500 to 2000 USD a month. My rent is 980, then I buy food, transportation, utilities, and I need to save something since I will not be physically able to work my whole life.

Wouldn’t it be nice if institutions could support your free thoughts so that you don’t have to worry about the dirty business of capitalism when creating your work? Why aren’t white men’s right-wing grassroots movements subject to the same critique of being dirty and capitalist and thus not ideologically pure that the left brings onto itself every day? Is consciousness an illusion of propaganda and is dreamwork a form of escapism?

I feel like if our politics were less corporate and wealth was distributed more equally, that would be fantastic because then I could change the business side of my work, which is the side I least like doing. I don’t know if this answers your question about capitalism and political consciousness. I guess, though I can’t and won’t talk about wokeness, my work is also pretty American and I’m still here wishing for a less haunted America, or an America ready to see its ghosts.

JS: In the context of this exhibition, what is the social value of art in general and your art in particular?

AS: I believe that art is first and foremost a social relation. I don’t see art as a series of beautiful objects but as social relationships. I don’t think a beautiful object can be created in an ugly relationship and that’s why our world is so constipated.

Ever since I started making and posting memes, I got a lot more Instagram followers than I’m used to and that’s really freaked me out. I feel this pressure to keep making them because I like the attention (I'm an Aries). It’s also allowed me to self-publish and sell more books. I know that Instagram is kind of dying so this anxiety isn’t really about the platform as much as a general anxiety about social capital.

I believe that social capital is important for everyone. We hoard money because we feel like we can’t rely on our communities for support in birth and illness and aging, because we feel lacking in social capital and because we’re alienated. I believe that power is important. I believe that power, like love, is something that grows stronger the more that it is shared. I don’t believe that you can have power over someone in the same way that you can’t have love over someone.

I think that we all have anxieties about social capital and power because these things are often framed in an ugly way, in a hierarchal way, in a white-people-will-come-here-and-take-this again-and-sell-it-back-to-you kind of way way. We feel like we don’t deserve social capital and power or like those things are tainted. In actuality, everyone feeling like they have influence and agency are incredibly important to a consensual community. I’m working on this problem of power and not just with astrology. I do a lot of self-work around this too and in my day job, which is creating community programs in immigrant communities for youth and seniors. What I don’t know is whether this is art because it’s not really in the art world but it’s super creative for me.

Photo courtesy of Mengwen Cao.