Paranormal Ethnographies of Ketamine - Giorgia Gaia - Zoom

Paranormal Ethnographies of Ketamine

Over the past six years, this ongoing investigation into the paranormal dimensions of psychoactive experiences has continued to identify Ketamine journeys as uniquely significant. Ketamine remains a profoundly paradoxical substance at once celestial and infernal. Its remarkable psychedelic capacities intertwined with its well-documented potential for dependence. Nonetheless, accounts of deep Ketamine “breakthroughs” stand out as particularly compelling for the study of anomalous and paranormal phenomena. The substance seems to grant access to liminal territories where conventional understandings of reality and unreality, as well as time and space, can be dismantled and reconfigured in unexpected ways.

This lecture revisits and expands upon the “magical” qualities attributed to Ketamine, emphasizing its capacity to open hyperdimensional experiential spaces that, although sharing affinities with other psychedelics, remain strikingly distinct. Over the years, Ketamine has gained increasing prominence within an underground psychonautic occulture, a community drawn to the esoteric and metaphysical potentials of altered states, as well as within the broader field of contemporary psychedelia.

The ethnographic material presented reflects an evolving archive: a continually expanding collection of interviews, uncanny experiences, and reports of alternate or “alter(n)ate” realities shared by adventurous psychonauts across diverse sets and settings. Together, these accounts trace a living, open-ended inquiry into the ways Ketamine continues to shape, distort, and illuminate the boundaries of human perception.

Speaker Bio

Giorgia Gaia is an independent researcher, with MA degrees in Cultural and Social Anthropology and in History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents at the University of Amsterdam. Since her early twenties she has been involved in the underground scene of rave culture, as a DJ and cultural producer. Her academic research has focused on countercultures, esoteric communities, occultism and psychonautic. Being herself continuously involved in the creation of alter(n)ate realities and magickal experimentations, since 2013 she is co-curator of Ozora Festival’s cultural area. In 2018 she founded Occulture Conference, a Berlin based festival exploring occultism and esoteric arts.

https://occultureconference.com

Curated and hosted by

Maya Bracknell Watson is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, retired cult leader and psychedelic researcher.

Her background is in psychedelic parapsychology research with Greenwich University, specialising in exceptional human experience and entity encounters on psychedelics, and as an artist. She has studied shamanism for 10 years, working closely with Amerindian indigenous shamanic cultures of Mexico and Peru and western neoshamanic groups, focusing on the introduction and integration of indiginous and animistic knowledge and perspectives to westerners and western ontologies.

She publicly lectures on the subjects of psychedelics and shamanism, and produces art on the subjects informed by her research and experience, including films, performances, writing and immersive worlds. She has performed and exhibited at the Tate Britain and Breaking Convention and is the creator and host of Psychedelicacies, an online lecture series.

Walking between the worlds of art, psychedelic science and shamanism she works to bridge them and uses each as investigatory tools to inform and articulate each other.

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