The Mage: Kasia Töns

Disappearing Act

The Magician as archetype is widely considered the wise and all-knowing one, the one who perceives hidden forces and makes them visible. In Meditations on the Tarot, the anonymous author suggests that, as the first Major Arcana in the Tarot, The Magician stands at the threshold, not as a master of secrets but as the one who learns to attend. It is his role to reveal the practical method for understanding all the Arcana, and central to this method is achieving a state of concentration without effort[i]. The Magician represents a path of knowledge that does not start with mystery but with attention. The magic in a sleight-of-hand trick is not illusion, but a diversion of focus; a simple act, executed with acute awareness, creating awe.

Kasia Töns refigures the archetype of The Magician/Mage through the lens of the heroine, drawing from the lives of women whose lived experiences pushed the boundaries of their realities. She has assembled a guiding force of survivalists, activists, seekers and adventurers, including Emma Gatewood, Ada Blackjack, Isabelle Eberhardt, Commandante Ramona, Julia Butterfly Hill and Lhakpa Sherpa. Many of these women disappeared into a self-imposed challenge of endurance in order to reappear transformed. Through their stories, Töns reveals a model for knowledge made visceral by attention, endurance, improvisation, courage, and intimate dialogue with the natural world.

Töns’ heroines are shape-shifting presences throughout her work in The Mage, companions on her own journey of making and existing. Close observation sees them documented in hand-stitched sketches, such as in the intricate research cartographies Caterpillar and Calling In, Calling Out. Their characteristics have been enshrined in a series of Sigil Masks to be summoned through ritual activation when they need to be embodied. In this way, Töns’ heroines have become not unlike The Mage itself: part human, part metaphor, part instruction manual for how to live otherwise.

Among her series of kinaesthetic investigations, Töns set herself a task of inefficient movement: to follow a tide, follow a river, follow a dog and follow a weather. These acts of relinquishing navigational control to natural forces allowed for intuition and instinct to take over. She attributes the act of journaling this process—Follow a weather diary 1 and Follow a weather diary 2 —to making the many divergent tangents of this project finally make sense. Canine Cartography documents what Töns recalls as the least optimal of these inefficiencies, where she handed complete control of a walk to her canine companion, Toddy. She describes this as a process of learning and unlearning for both of them, implying that some lessons may only need to be learned once. Canine Cartography combines this personal experience with an early childhood recollection of her own mother’s adventure into the wilderness- an equally treacherous and no less essential quest to rupture and reshape reality.

It could be said that Töns has stepped into the role of The Mage, not by claiming its authority but by circling its peripheries. She would disagree, instead claiming a central character of The Researcher, which more comfortably sees her not becoming a knowledgeable master or conjurer of illusions, but acting as a mediator between worlds. The Researcher has traced her readings and footnotes across unfamiliar and too-familiar terrain through embodied acts of movement and making. In this way, she has transformed The Mage from archetype into process. The Mage is a practical method of forgetting and remembering, the willingness to be led by tangents and detours while simultaneously paying attention to the quotidian and the esoteric, until the edges of both are blurred. It is through this mode of inquiry that magic rises- out of attention, play, and perseverance.