MYR

An anthropological research about psychedelic experiences with psilocybin truffles with Eta, a facilitator who works in Utrecht. She helps people dealing with depression or anxiety, a new cycle in life, exploring themselves or working on addictions.

Myr means many things: in astronomy, it is the abbreviation of millions of years, and in the Slavic languages “mir” indicates the noun “peace”.

In addition to this, it is Eta’s PSYCHEDELIC SUPPORT project.

ETA lives in Utrecht and works to provide support and assistance to those who intend to undertake psychedelic experiences through psychoactive substances, such as PSILOCYBIN, contained in particular types of truffles, or Salvia Divinorum, both legal in the NETHERLANDS.

Today we start talking about PSYCHEDELIA, recovering those studies on the potential of entheogenic substances, abruptly truncated by the more reactionary demands of bourgeois society in the 1960s and 1970s.

FROM AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL POINT OF VIEW, how do we explain this promising response of psychedelics to mental conditions and the general well-being of the psychophysical and emotional state of the individual?

Can our body, the first tool we have, built starting from learned habits and ways of being in the world, be somehow reprogrammed by the psychedelic experience?

And how to translate the psychedelic experience into daily practice? Can psychedelics offer us a new way of being and being in the world?

This project is composed of a fundamental ethnographic approach (field research, interviews, and heterogeneous documentation) and a body of photographic work, composed of the documentation of supports with the collaboration of Eta, still life of psychoactive substances, especially containing psilocybin, and above all images generated by meetings with people who wanted to share their most powerful and revolutionary psychedelic experience.

To read the first part of the research, accompanied by the interview with Eta and the field experience in September 2020, please refer here (only in Italian).