FANTAST IN FOCUS: FERDINANDO BUSCEMA
“Your focus determines your reality.” This advice, given to Anakin Skywalker by Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, perfectly sums up the interdependent relationship between perception and experience. The idea behind it is that a person’s subjective passions and opinions can easily alter his experience of certain events. Those events ultimately become his reality.
In the Star Wars films, Jedi have the ability to ‘bend’ reality by employing a mix of gestures, words, and charisma known collectively as mind tricks. Although the Jedi are fictional characters, Ferdinando Buscema is a comparable living equivalent, a magus who draws on ancient Greek and Italian philosophies to create controlled experiences of astonishment.
Ferdinando evokes and constructs these artificial universes (or magical experiences) on stage, in corporate offices, and on university campuses. In the course of his career, he’s given lectures for TEDx and Stanford University and performed at renowned venues such as The Magic Castle in Hollywood.
We recently chatted with him to learn more about the magical mechanics behind his ‘wonder machines’.
The Custodian: What are the fundamental pieces one needs in order to construct a “magical experience?”
Fernando Buscema: I’m not sure there is a formal recipe — at least to the best of my knowledge. This is not an exact science, it’s more of an art form. First of all, I would describe a “magical experience” as an event or a circumstance that you intentionally design for someone in order for this ‘recipient’ to experience some degree of surprise and amazement. However, the very categories of surprise and amazement are deeply subjective variables. That’s where the game becomes tricky.
I believe that the wider the group, the smaller the amount of surprise they will generally experience. That’s why when I’m addressing larger crowds – like in big corporate events – I wear my magician persona, using my performing repertoire to provide the audience with the appropriate dose of wonder.
But, when the size of the audience shrinks, things get even more interesting, and you can really blow their socks off.
If we imagine a kind of ‘spectrum of wonder’, on the higher end of such spectrum, you can create something truly magical when targeting one single person. The trick here is to be willing to explore someone’s interests, to jack into their universe of symbols and meanings. Once you have the patience and willingness to know enough about the recipient’s reality, sooner or later your creative juices will flow towards making a “magical experience” happen.
Let me share a recent personal example. I wanted to design a “magical experience” for my father, to frame a birthday present for him. I keenly avoided to giving him a gift on his birthday. Everyone expects a gift on his/her birthday, so half of the surprise is unavoidably spoiled. My father has a lifelong passion for The Beatles, so the gift of choice was a collector copy of their Help! album. The perfect day to deliver such gift was August 6th 2015. On that very day, during a conversation with my dad, I brought up the subject of The Beatles, of how much I love them myself, and how grateful I was to him for listening to their music while I was growing up, which left a deep musical imprint in me. Then I said: “Dad, do you know what day it is today? It’s August 6th. Today it’s exactly FIFTY years since Help! was released in 1965. Isn’t that amazing that after half a century The Beatles’ music still rocks? To celebrate the magic and beauty of their music, I have a gift for YOU!” I then handed him the package with the LP.
This is what I call a “magical experience”. And, besides the label we use to describe such an event, I trust my father would agree that it was a surprisingly delightful moment for him. (Seeing tears of joy in someone’s eyes is generally a reliable sign that you hit the nail on the head!)
Powerful “magical experiences” can be designed when you specifically plug into someone’s symbolic universe. Of course, the degree of personalisation you can reach for one single person you cannot get dealing with 500 or 5000 people at once.
So, the overall thinking about designing a “magical experience” is to create moments of wonder outside of a theatrical context. The book Amaze – written together with my “Wonder Injector” pal Mariano Tomatis – is a guide to the manifold possibilities to bring magic into everyday life.
C: In one of your lectures, you say that “the real secret of magic is that the world is made of words”. This is a beautiful statement. Can you explain it a little more?
F: The quote comes from a speech of the late American philosopher and ethnobotanist, Terence McKenna, whose works have been quite influential on my thinking during the years.
The quote beautifully captures a deep and eternal truth about our Sapiens Sapiens condition: we are language animals. We map our experience of reality through language, and our use of words shape and affect our daily understanding of the external world. We are enfolded in a feedback loop that inextricably links the words we use, the thoughts and feelings such words trigger, and the actions stemming from our thoughts and feelings. If this chain of cause-effects is true, we actually do things with our words. The outcome of one’s speech translates into pretty real ‘things’. And this is something every one of us does, more or less consciously, every day – to ourselves and to one another.
From a more esoteric point of view, think about a ‘magic spell’: a spell is a piece of language properly crafted to have a real effect on reality. Once again, although with a more Hermetic undertone, the idea is the same: making real things happen by choosing the right words. Also, from the point of view of most mythologies, the gods create the worlds through the spoken word, the Creative Logos. Anyway, without going too far, let’s acknowledge that even making a casual positive comment or a sincere compliment to a stranger can make someone’s day.
Words, consciously and intentionally deployed, do have magical powers.
C: You’re trained as an mechanical engineer. What led you to take an interest in performance magic?
F: I think that the pattern that connects engineering and magic is my lifelong curiosity to know how things work: be it a wrist watch, a car engine, the modus operandi of a magic trick, or a psychological mechanism. I clearly remember, as a child, the first time I saw two gears intermeshing. Something blew my mind. It’s been a peak experience. I knew there was something beautiful there that I had to understand. This event primed me to study mechanical engineering. I discovered magic at about that same time, and the two things didn’t look separate to me. They were just different aspects of the same thing, it all boiled down to the knowledge of how things work.
After a few years working as a mechanical engineer, as well as performing as a magician, these two professional identities intertwined and integrated with one another. I shifted gears from designing mechanical ‘things’ to engineering wonder and astonishment. That’s how I shapeshifted into a Magic Experience Designer.
C: Italy has a deep tradition of magic and theatre. Do you see yourself as particularly influenced by certain personalities (past and present)?
F: We are indeed standing on the shoulders of giants, whose work and ideas – I like to believe – somehow reverberates in my own small world. Let me mention 3 names:
1. Pythagoras. I grew up in a small city called Crotone, an ancient Greek colony, where the famous philosopher and mathematician settled his mystery school. Pythagoras has been a very early inspiration to ponder about the magical nature of numbers, their relationship with music, as well as the cosmic harmony of the spheres.
2. Another shining star is Giordano Bruno, with his landmark intuitions of the existence of multiverses, the practice of the Art of Memory, and his conception of Love as the “One only Force [that] links and gives life to infinite worlds”. In particular, I believe that Love – as described in his book De Vinculis in Genere – is the ultimate force to create the bond that makes magic happen.
3. Elémire Zolla, a contemporary Italian scholar and historian of religions, whose dense and rich writings have been instrumental to widen my understanding of Eastern and Western mysticism traditions.
C: Every day there is a new article about technological improvement and different augmented reality devices. As science and fantasy continue to merge, how do you envision the future of magic?
F: This is difficult to say. I agree with scholar of religions Lawrence E. Sullivan when he wrote, “The horizon of the unknown moves outward with the horizon of knowledge”. Such flowing interplay of known and unknown is a source of magic and aesthetic delight. No matter how advanced our technological artifacts will be, the need for magic and mystery – being something primal and archetypical – will always be part of the human experience. I don’t know exactly how magic will shape-shift… but I trust that future wonder-workers will keep on blowing our minds!
Hi, Ferdinando, so good to get this opportunity to learn from you. You will like me new book, Persephone Rising: Awakening the Heroine Within, which is for women and men who partner with them at home, work or anywhere. It is full of magic! It is available now for pre-order, and can be in your hands October 13, or free and likely earlier if you want to be an Influencer that spreads the word.
Carol