WiccaLeaks was filmed by the artist in a large underground car park in central London just a short walk from the Ecuador London Embassy and features a soundtrack by Terry Riley. Its title a pun on WikiLeaks an organisation that publishes secret information and set up by the Internet activist Julian Assange. The work seemingly temporarily releases Julian Assange from his confines at the Ecuador Embassy via an act of Wiccan ritual.
Wicca is seen as an occult or hidden art and in this it has parallels with the security services who carry out covert and hidden practices – the revealing of secrets has always carried a sanction – to conversely inverse this by using one to release the other from a sanction is a kind of paradox. The lyrics and powerful soundtrack from the contemporary experimental composer Terry Riley add to this atmosphere. In traditional magical archetypes the fool and the magician are considered to embody the same conflicting principles. Julian Assange in lifting the veil of state craft has paid a heavy personal price, the same authorities who covet such state secrets so dearly have argued the opposite – that it is Assange who has conversely put its operatives in danger. In a technical age of the global network when all secrets both personal and private to the individual, to the state and corporations are seemingly up for grabs and in a time when social media encourages the private in the public space – what is secret or hidden and what sanctions should be in place have become blurred. The location of the film acts as a contemporary concrete metaphor to the underworld of secrets, a dream like Dante’s world fused with the mythic and the modern.
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WiccaLeaks – The Teleportation of Julian Assange
