Manifesto

Kataba­sia is a sym­bol, a label, and a name of the infor­ma­tion envi­ron­ment that includes an epony­mous web­site, a VK group, and sev­er­al chats and com­mu­ni­ties on oth­er ser­vices.

Kataba­sia is a coun­ter­cul­tur­al infor­ma­tion flow com­mu­ni­cat­ed by a group of jour­nal­ists, artists, pub­li­cists, and musi­cians, which is ded­i­cat­ed to Art, Occultism, Psy­che­delia, and the study of social stigma­ti­za­tion and taboo.

Above all, Kataba­sia is a metaphor of the supreme forces descend­ing to the under­world. This is the metaphor that unites us all in the idea of the search of the ways to destroy the Black Iron Prison – the sym­bol of fun­da­men­tal Igno­rance fet­ter­ing minds and caus­ing the tyran­ny of the laws that con­trol the soci­ety, the human nature, and even the real­i­ty itself.

Accord­ing to our myth, the fet­ters of the Black Iron Prison can be cast off only through Knowl­edge and find­ing fel­lows for col­lab­o­ra­tive explo­ration of the self and the world, and bring­ing some­thing new to the world. We do not con­sid­er this Knowl­edge to be arcane and beyond the reach of the ‘sim­ple minds’ – on the con­trary, its fire secret­ly glows in the hearts of all pris­on­ers of this world, whether they know it or not yet. The sparks of this fire dis­pel the dark­ness of Igno­rance.

Our mis­sion (and yours!) con­sists in col­lect­ing these sparks, mate­ri­al­ized in the works of great thinkers, cre­ators, and enthu­si­asts, and deliv­er­ing them to the low­er, less illu­mi­nat­ed planes of the psy­cho­geo­graph­ic domain.

We are you. You are us. We are doing this because we can­not do oth­er­wise. We make no claim for men­tor­ship or absolute truth, but exper­i­men­tal­ly explore a range of tracks that lead towards the Inef­fa­ble. And in our life­long jour­ney, we are com­mit­ted to look­ing for fel­low trav­el­ers that would keep us com­pa­ny, learn­ing from us and let­ting us learn from them.

With this in mind, we tend the fire in the light­house at the cross­ing at these tracks, to attract the like-mind­ed. Every day over the past five years, we have been cre­at­ing and devel­op­ing Kataba­sia, through which we make artis­tic state­ments and build a com­mu­ni­ca­tion net­work with­in the Russ­ian-speak­ing counter-cul­ture com­mu­ni­ty.

We hope that our activ­i­ty will make a dif­fer­ence for you, con­fi­dant. We hope that it will inspire you to join our ranks, and there will be more of us in this desert of the real­i­ty. And once we will meet at the low­er depths to crush the gates of Hell, bring­ing the unspeak­able free­dom upon all its pris­on­ers.

Let the descend­ing light reach the bot­tom of the dark­ness!