Ritual Renewal, the second part of the double edition of ŠUM#26 CULTS, turns toward the phenomenon of the cult as a site of ritual intensity and collective transformation.

Rather than merely a marginal social formation defined by its distance from dominant belief systems, the cult can be understood as a space in which shared gestures, symbols, and repeated practices bind individuals into a common rhythm, enabling participants to step outside established realities and enter alternative modes of perception and belonging. From small circles of initiates emerge not only new ideas but lived experiences of conversion, devotion, and altered consciousness, through which participants rehearse different ways of being together and imagining the world. The cult thus appears as an incubator of transformation where belief is enacted through ritualized forms of participation that gradually solidify into shared realities.

The issue begins with the problem of desire. In “Tekel”, Helena Łomnicka examines the relationship between desire, lack, and contemporary forms of subjectivity through the intersecting frameworks of psychoanalysis, capitalism, secularization, and contemporary art. Drawing on Lacan’s conception of desire as arising from an irreducible sense of lack, the article argues that modern society has shifted from the boredom associated with Fordist monotony toward a condition of excessive stimulation, in which consumption, entertainment, spirituality, and other forms of intensity promise fulfilment but ultimately reproduce dissatisfaction. Through its analysis of Lőrinc Borsos’s Weighed Found Wanting, the biblical concept of Tekel, and the artist’s own engagement with religion and art, the article presents this recurring movement between desire and dissatisfaction as a fundamental structure of human existence. Rather than treating lack as a deficiency that can ultimately be overcome, it concludes that recognizing and accepting this condition may allow for a more open-ended understanding of faith, desire, and existence.

If desire begins with an absence that cannot be resolved, the question becomes what forms might be created around that absence. Dylan Smith examines Sofiia Yesakova’s artistic practice as an exploration of history, memory, technology, and spirituality. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben and Martin Heidegger, the essay argues that Yesakova uses art to challenge the technological and rational structures that shape contemporary society while creating spaces in which history and transcendence can be reconsidered. Her works, particularly War Landscape in the Optic of Icons, Altar in a Modern Context, and Cargo 200: Experimental Projections on Surfaces, juxtapose military and technological imagery with religious iconography, producing an unresolved tension between technological nihilism and the possibility of spiritual renewal. The central concern is the distinction between memory and history: rather than treating monuments as fixed containers of collective memory, Yesakova uses absence, fragmentation, and material ambiguity to prevent history from becoming static or politically appropriated.

Yet the possibility of alternative meaning is necessarily conditioned by the structures that determine what may count as legitimate belief, knowledge, and experience. In “Who is Breathing in this Room? The Artist as Heretic”, Àngels Miralda examines the figure of the heretic as a model for understanding contemporary artistic practice, particularly its relationship to power, orthodoxy, marginality, and dissent. Miralda defines the heretic not simply as an outsider but as someone who challenges an established system from within, transforming free thought and criticism into forms of resistance against institutional authority. This framework is applied to the practices of Raisa Maudit, Nils Alix-Tabeling, and Inside Job, whose works engage with suppressed histories, queer identities, vernacular language, ecological destruction, and marginalized communities. Through references to figures such as the beguines, Marguerite Porete, Joan of Arc, and the cult of Dionysus, the article demonstrates how heresy can function as both a historical condition and a contemporary artistic strategy.

And what happens when the existing system can no longer sustain itself? Elliot Higgs examines VISIO and Rustan Söderling’s Youth Grows Forever as a meditation on meaning-making and re-enchantment amid civilizational collapse. Drawing on Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, neomedievalism, tarot, folklore and theories of Technic and Magic, it argues that the work depicts belief as a process of recombining cultural fragments after the collapse of their original contexts. Its post-apocalyptic landscape transforms medieval and popular symbols into provisional forms of meaning, culminating in the Hanged Man’s transformation from a suspended body into a vegetal, regenerative figure.

Continuing on the theme of ruins and decay, “The Price of Dwelling” examines the ruin as a liminal space where material decay, memory, and alternative forms of dwelling intersect. Focusing on Ema Maznik Antić and Maks Bricelj’s Dwellings in Machinic Passages, presented at the 5th Industrial Art Biennial in Raša, it considers how the abandoned Prvomajska Factory can be reactivated as a site of attunement, clandestine gathering, and alternative knowledge. Drawing on Bachelard, Turner, Wajcman, and Yeager, the text explores the ruin as both a refuge and a threat, arguing that dwelling within it requires an adaptation to material and atmospheric forces that exceed human intention.

Finally, Federico Ruberto concludes the issue by reflecting on art’s capacity to resist contemporary aesthetic saturation, instrumental rationality, and the proliferation of easily consumable speculative forms. Focusing on Alexandra Koumantaki’s Out of Stardust Into Love, it proposes radical aisthesis—an intensified sensory engagement—as a means of disrupting habitual modes of perception and reopening relations between matter, thought, affect, and alterity. The artwork is understood as a liminal presence: simultaneously material and immaterial, object and atmosphere, silence and vibration. Through this ambiguity, it produces a phenomenological suspension—a “shiver”—in which recognition gives way to embodied encounter and the possibility of sensing the Real without reducing it to fixed meaning. Ultimately, the text argues for an art practice grounded in slowness, opacity, sensation, and transformation, where truth is not a stable proposition but an emergent process of encounter capable of generating new forms of thought, life, and relation.

Taken together, the essays move across different scales of transformation—from the structure of subjective desire to the organization of collective belief, from the contestation of established orders to their collapse, and from symbolic reconstruction to material inhabitation and sensory experience. What connects these otherwise distinct practices is not a shared commitment to any particular system of belief but an attention to the conditions under which systems of meaning become unstable and new configurations can emerge. Ritual renewal, in this sense, does not imply a return to an originary or stable form. It describes instead a process through which existing relations between subject, world, and meaning are rendered provisional: challenged, fragmented, recombined, inhabited differently, and ultimately perceived anew. The cult, understood through this expanded lens, becomes less a fixed category than a model for such processes—a threshold at which belief is enacted, reality is collectively negotiated, and transformation becomes a practice of world-making.