A CONVERSATION with JOHANNA HEDVA & ARIANA REINES

Johanna Hedva and Ariana Reines discuss music, art, gender fluidity, cultural collapse, discipline, astrology, and more. The conversation opens with the public debut of a live recording of Hedva performing 'O Death' at Vox Ton Studio in March of 2021, and flows through their most recent book, Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain.

This event was free, with an option to donate. Live-captioning was provided by Ellis Suzanna Slack and is available on this recording.

Johanna Hedva is a Korean-American writer, artist, musician, and astrologer, who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches, and now lives in LA and Berlin. Hedva’s practice cooks magic, necromancy, and divination together with mystical states of fury and ecstasy. There is always the body — its radical permeability, dependency, and consociation — but the task is how to eclipse it, how to nebulize it, and how to cope when this inevitably fails. Ultimately, Hedva’s work, no matter the genre, is different kinds of writing, whether it’s words on a page, screaming in a room, or dragging a hand through water. Hedva is the author of Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain (2020), a collection of poems, performances, and essays, and the novel On Hell (2018). Their album Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House, a doom-metal guitar and voice performance influenced by Korean shamanist ritual was released in January 2021, and their 2019 album The Sun and the Moon had two of its tracks played on the moon.