Knill's Magic 2.o: Underworlding War and Water

Abstract

Conflict shatters infrastructure, yet seldom extinguishes the human impulse to play. Across time and geographies, children and adults have answered artillery, rising seas, and bureaucratic paralysis with improvised stages, lantern festivals, augmented-reality portals, and whispering drones. This paper traces that stubborn aesthetic metabolism from a WorldWar II cellar on the Swiss-German frontier, recalled by expressive-arts pioneer Paolo J. Knill, to contemporary workshops in Rafah, Port Vila, Qelekuro, Jenin, Kherson, and beyond.

By reading Knill's "Magic Underworld" alongside digital and climate-era counterparts, the study argues that communal art-making functions as a mobile shelter in which logistical attunement, technological fragility, and collective imagination converge to restore psychosocial bandwidth. Within that shelter three analytic lenses crystallise: distributed rehearsal (the fragile yet repeatable interval in which participants pace catastrophe and rehearse alternative tempos), infrastructural doubleness (the oscillation that lets one sca old survival and imagination at once), and durational poetics (the stretching of creative gestures so meaning accrues through repetition rather than climax). The genealogy of these ideas begins in Knill's Rhine-side cellar, a site children converted from bunker, to theatre by password, and puppet (Knill, 2011).