Film shown in Walsingham Parish Hall as part of the event

In Search of the Miraculous 2023

In 1973, Anne Bean cut through the book In Search of the Miraculous, by the philosopher, P.D. Ouspensky, who was writing on the early teachings of the seeker George Gurdjieff. This rectangular void that she created inside the covers, allowed one to peer through the entire book to see two halves of a photo that she had glued in to the inside of the back and front cover, as though looking at both ends of a tunnel simultaneously, to see the whole. Many ancient cultures proposed that there is a fifth element called ether or void existing outside of the material world, the same as ideas, visions or thoughts do. Ouspensky wrote: “the undoubted fact that beyond the thin film of false reality there existed another reality from which, for some reason, something separated us. The ’miraculous’ was a penetration into this unknown reality.” Fifty years after the original intervention with the book, Anne Bean’s film In Search of the Miraculous, probes again this penetration, partly with the awareness that according to the currently established laws of nature, the future, the present and the past all exist in the same way, ‘there is nothing in these laws that distinguishes one moment from any other.’ She worked with different ‘backwards’ and ‘forwards’ processes, both in actuality and in ideas, to create the work, edited by Alex Eisenberg