​

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 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, dialectical materialism, 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 and particularly working class women abandoned and discarded by society. We reject bourgeois feminist conceptions of power and strength and seek to exalt the subaltern strength of survival that many within constrained and actively violent and precarious material conditions possess. We seek to help others find this power in themselves to heal from the biological, material and social affects of violence against against disabled and disposed of women in this world to free ourselves from the violence we are subject to- be it domestic violence, sexual exploitation or the simple day to day disregard of our worth and value that psyops us into not seeing our true power. We reject the culture of degeneration and disposal imposed on women surviving in this world and embrace a dignified fight for life a disciplined politics of life affirmation. 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 for survivors here and now. We understand this work as to be part of broader revolutionary, feminist and practical forms of adaptation that women predominately have taken up as our mission, caring for those (including ourselves) when no one else would.
 

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.

We center the lives of working class women living with PTSD, as feminists committed to accessibility, collective participation, and long-term cultural transformation. We actively a militantly enforce care, intentionality, warmth, support, respect and invitation without expectation as a contrast to the often elitist, cold, exclusionary and cruelty based norms of the exploiter classes of this world.  We welcome collaboration from artists, survivors, researchers, and organizers who share our commitment to life-affirming, anti-fascist, and socially engaged art.