OCCULT

At the age of thirty-three, Alba Zari’s biological grandmother Rosa fled the family home in Trieste, leaving her husband and two younger children, and went with Zari’s mother Ivana, then thirteen years old, to live with a Christian fundamentalist sect called the Children of God (now known as The Family International). Founded in 1968 by a former pastor named David Berg—who also went by King David, Moses David or Dad/Grandad—the sect’s teachings advocated polyamory, sexual emancipation and tantra, but also incest, prostitution and intra-sect procreation that often employed underage sex and coercion. For years the family moved between India, Nepal and Thailand, following the cult’s peregrinations; Ivana had her own children, Alba, and a younger brother. In 1991, when Zari was four years old, and after allegations of psychological violence and child abuse began to loosen the sect’s grip on its adherents, the family left Thailand and returned, after 22 years, to Trieste. Reintegration has been complex and painful; Zari’s mother Ivana currently lives in a psychiatric facility, suffering from schizophrenia.

Through interactions with the family archive, as well as archival footage, imagery and texts from other members of the sect and propagandistic, sexualised comics drawn by David, Occult attempts to navigate Ivana’s life. Too young to rationalise her experiences with the Children of God, and with a mother too distressed to fill in the gaps, Zari has embarked on a journey that exposes photography as a vehicle for supposed truths, exploitative fictions and sanitised family histories. The work emerges as a fragmentary yet expansive, unsettling and brave deconstruction of the threads of indoctrination and abuse at the heart of the cult’s dogma, set against a backdrop of cultural colonialism and Western paternalism. Apparently cheerful family snapshots and ecstatic singing and dancing from the sect’s archives are juxtaposed with a step-by-step guide that breaks down the COG approach of “Flirty Fishing”: a practice of prostituting young female members of the sect in order to attract new recruits. Original imagery shot by Zari on yoga and tantra retreats, popularised by Westerners seeking meaning in ritual and spiritualism, provokes speculation on the predatory nature of much spiritual tourism, the appropriation of the wellness industry, and the ways in which this predation and appropriation was reflected in the communes of the Children of God.

Occult is both confrontational and deeply compassionate. It poses uncomfortable questions on how far one will go in their search for meaning and acceptance, and at what cost.