Unforseen Forseens

Unforeseen Foreseens, whose title derives from Donald Rumsfeld’s now infamous formulation on the “known knowns” and “unknown unknowns,” explores the unstable territory between political rationality and prophetic speculation. Conceived as a site-specific installation, the work takes the form of a tripartite corridor: an indeterminate passageway linking one historical possibility to another. The corridor becomes a performative architecture through which circulate the forces that have long shaped the social world — political power, religious and moral authority, and the divinatory systems that claim to interpret the movements of celestial bodies.

Its imposed linearity evokes structures of social and bodily control: the corridors of power, submission, procession, and confinement. At the same time, the etymology of the word corridor — from the European corridore, “one who runs to transfer messages” — introduces a system of temporal, spatial, and communicative transmission, where prophecy and governance become intertwined mechanisms of mediation.

The project continues Cibic’s long-term investigation into the construction of national mythologies and ideological narratives, here reintroducing the frequently suppressed figure of the political astrologer. Through an archival methodology, the work traces historical moments in which political authority sought legitimacy not only through military or institutional power, but through forms of celestial interpretation and prophecy. The installation draws attention to the persistence of astrological consultation within ostensibly rational modern political systems: from the imperial courts of antiquity to the twentieth century, when figures such as Ronald and Nancy Reagan secretly consulted astrologer Joan Quigley to determine the timing of presidential travel, speeches, negotiations, and public appearances. Quigley herself claimed that even summit meetings between Reagan and Gorbachev were astrologically timed, revealing how governance and superstition continue to coexist beneath the surface of modern statecraft.

This tension between political authority, elite cultural hegemony, and the resistant survival of popular belief systems forms the conceptual core of the work. By examining political astrology as both ideological apparatus and psychological support structure, Cibic reveals how power repeatedly turns toward systems of divination in moments of uncertainty, crisis, or historical transition. Astrology appears not as an irrational residue external to governance, but as a hidden technology of statecraft operating alongside bureaucratic reason.

Formally, the corridor becomes a mutable stage in which performers “decorate” the transitional space using uniformly sized rubber stamps. Echoing the formal logic of tiled and mosaic surfaces, ornamental patterns establish the compositional framework within which figurative and narrative scenes emerge. These stamped constellations collectively construct a speculative archive — an attempt to formulate a methodology for categorizing the relationship between political power, prophecy, and the symbolic construction of history itself.