Avalon, The relentless association, from the Renaissance onwards, of the Middle Ages with the ‘hypereconomy’ of the gift, with whatever exceeds calculation or rationality, for good or for ill, has made the Middle Ages a marker of fantasy and excess (…), a figure of the unnecessary and the extraordinary.
Louise Fradenburg, 1997
‘Avalon’ is the first curatorial investigation into premodern futurity by The Confraternity of Neoflagellants – lay peoples dedicated to the ascetic application, dissemination and treatment of neomedievalism in contemporary culture. Borne of the ‘new irrationalism’ of ‘zombie capitalism’, they are attuned to the scent of medieval in the commons, in the folkmote, the plateau of middle, in post-post-industrialism.
The exhibition will specifically augment The Embassy’s residency within the crypt and bell tower of the Baronial Revival Roxburgh Church. The Confraternity will draw from the scholastic symbolism of Dante Alighieri’s Commedia – the principle ‘map’ of dualistic medieval cosmology and a mythology important to the hacker intelligentsia of early Internet development communities – to codify the ecclesiastical space according to neomedieval gaming principles of ‘grinding’ and ‘levelling-up’.
In conjunction with The Embassy, Edinburgh Annuale, Edinburgh College of Art and Central Station, a collaborative codex of rhizomic illuminations will be made available. Additionally, on the 28th June, the Confraternity will mount the lectern to expound further irrationaliisms.
The Confraternity of Neoflagellants was founded in 2009 by Serjeant-At-Law Norman Hogg and joined by Keeper of the Wardrobe Neil Mulholland. It is a secular and equal opportunities confraternity bound by chirograph.