Conspiratio is an independent, annual periodical devoted to what Ivan Illich called “research by people”: disciplined inquiry undertaken not primarily for academic careers or professional expertise, but by those seeking to live more thoughtfully, more freely, and with less dependence—in thought and deed—on the market and the state.
The periodical grew out of a community of friends who knew, worked with, or were deeply influenced by Ivan Illich, and who wished to keep alive not simply his ideas, but his distinctive way of asking questions. Today, Conspiratio brings these voices into conversation with a new generation of thinkers, artists, craftspeople, activists, and readers from around the world. Rather than cultivating a school of thought or defending a doctrine, it seeks to nurture the practice of “thinking with” Illich: engaging contemporary questions in dialogue with history. Published both as a handcrafted printed edition and as a freely accessible digital archive, each issue extends an open invitation to join that conversation. Though conducted through the medium of the written word, the periodical invokes the hoped-for intimacy of con-spiration1).
Sajay Samuel is the Editor. Isabelle Cedotti is the designer and curator of each issue, both digital and printed. Neto Leão and Samar Farage collaborate intensively on translations, proofreading, and revisions.
The website is maintained through the collaborative work of friends, including Franco Augusto, Isabelle Cedotti, and Neto Leão.
Ivan Illich (1926–2002) was a priest, historian, and social critic whose work resists easy filing. Trained in theology and medieval history, he ran a center in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where scholars gathered to interrogate the export of Western institutions—schooling, medicine, development—to the rest of the world. Out of that work came books like Deschooling Society, Tools for Conviviality, and Medical Nemesis: …a broad-ranging critique of industrial society, written in a vocabulary largely of his own making. Where others gestured at the costs of progress, Illich gave the damage names: iatrogenesis, the sickness caused by medicine itself; counterproductivity, the point past which an institution defeats its own purpose; the disabling professions, which manufacture the very needs they claim to serve.
His later work—Gender, H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness, The Loss of the Senses—turned toward history itself, reading modernity in the mirror of the past. He offered no program and no ideology. His clarity about the present required walking the narrow road between nostalgia for a lost past and enthusiasm for a utopian future.
In decrying what distorted or destroyed the personal capacity to learn, care, move, play, or dwell, Illich was neither scold nor pessimist. His faith in the possibility of freeing these capacities from the deadening hand of convention remained unshaken from his first essays in The Celebration of Awareness to his last long interview in The Rivers North of the Future. Conspiratio continues that work—not by preserving Illich as an authority, but by asking, in our own time, the kind of questions he asked of his.
Contributors to Conspiratio include:
Attilio del Vinco, Babette Babich, Barbara Duden, Barbara Hallensleben, Bernhard Pörksen, Bill Arney, Brother John – Taizé, Carl Mitcham, Carlos Tornel, Christophe Kotanyi, David Cayley, Dean Bavington, Denis Atkinson, Diego Ferraris, Fabio Milana, Giorgio Agamben, Giovanna Morelli, Giovanni Riganelli, Gustavo Esteva, Henry Zhu, Humberto Beck, Javier Sicilia, Jean Robert, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Joey Mokos, Jose Antonio Ullate, Joshua A. Klein, Kostas Hatzikiriakou, Lapo Chittaro, Leonardo Christopher Eck Glenewinkel, Luis Xavier López-Farjeat, Marianne Gronemeyer, Neto Leão, Nicola Labanca, Nilo Coradini de Freitas, Rebecca Gamez, Reimer Gronemeyer, Renee Uribe, Robert Kugelmann, Sajay Samuel, Samar Farage, Seonaid Abernethy, Siljia Samerski, Silke Kapp, Toby Everett, Valentina Borremans and Wolfgang Palaver.
Issues of Conspiratio have variously benefited from the creative thought and work of artists/art collectives including: Claudia Paranhos and Carmen Sapede, who hand craft each issue of the periodical, André Barone, Atelier Piratininga, De Etser Atelier, De Etser Encadernação, Ernesto Bonato, George Gütlich, Isabelle Cedotti, João Paulo Marques, Neto Leão, Ulysses Bôscolo, and Wagner de Santana Silva.
With thanks to Claudia Paranhos, Carmen Sapede, Ernesto Bonato, Marina Farina, and Platô Studio for their valuable contributions to the design of the periodical.