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About Savant Garde 

Savant Garde is a contemporary art movement and collective developing ritual-based, surrealist, and anti-alienation practices informed by dialectical materialism, feminist theory, mysticism, and anti-colonial/anti-fascist analysis. Founded in 2019 as the C.E.L.F or Catabasis Exaltation Liberation Front by Alice Aster and Halo of Solo Show and Underground Flower, the collective centers survivor-led methods that confront structures of domination and the cultural spectacle of violence and actively creates worlds and works that valorize subaltern and militantly messianic life within the society of control. 
 

Our practice includes public ritual actions, performance works, films, written works and online interventions—most notably The Savant Garde Manifesto acn and the recurring Epstein Exorcisms. These works employ somatic-surrealist strategies, collective ritual, and site-specific disruption to engage both the spiritual and material dimensions of social life.
 

Theory & Praxis

Savant Garde’s framework draws from Schizofeminism, somatic situationism, and mystical materialism—integrating embodied awareness, political analysis, and spiritual devotion as tools for confronting alienation. We emphasize “seizing the means of mythology production” and cultivating what we describe as the holy power of survival: a disciplined, life-affirming force grounded in creative adaptation, communal ritual, and the “electric fire of the Holy Spirit” as it manifests within material conditions.

Our work aims to move beyond narratives of crisis and chaos, rejecting the condemnation historically imposed on survivors. Through intentional ritual, collaborative action, and accessible artistic methods, Savant Garde seeks to build forms of sovereignty across the spiritual, social, emotional, and material realms.

Savant Garde is a developing, adaptive practice. We invite collaboration from artists, survivors, researchers, and organizers committed to life-affirming, anti-fascist, and socially engaged art.

essibility, collective participation, and long-term cultural transformation. We welcome collaboration from artists, survivors, researchers, and organizers who share our commitment to life-affirming, anti-fascist, and socially engaged art.