An Apparition

A short sermon & ambience on the apparitions of the divine

A darkened room, a projection with captions and video, ambient music, and soft narration moving through various mysteries — reciting historical moments and dictating future ones. Sound and image begin to twinkle in from many corners of the room, thanks to hidden performers: a portable projector flashing additional images and captions around the space, a portable speaker panning an additional layer of narration and field recordings through the audience. The sermon begins to feel like an atmosphere, like the purported visions and hallucinations of the apparitions themselves.

Who authenticates a miracle? What makes an apparition? Across Catholic, cyberfeminist, and Filipino animist traditions, the divine has always appeared at the peripheries — in glitches, in visions, in the bodies of girls and saints. Technology has only complicated and exacerbated these sights. An Apparition is a meditation on these entanglements: the infrastructural intimacies between faith, feminism, and the networks that contain us.