abstract
Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) is considered a pioneer of abstract painting. However, she herself hardly saw her artistic works as products or opus, but rather as a coherent system. Accordingly, the contribution presents and unfolds af Klint's paintings as an alternative version of modernism, an ecosystem or digestive system. This also takes up the mediumistic origin of the paintings: af Klint visualised transcendental messages. Looking forward and seeking out new possibilities (Bashkoff, 2018), she painted for a future that she perceiveed clairvoyantly.
In text and images, the piece Metabolic Drawings – Or: Drawing metabolic develops a speculative landscape that follows the images and convictions of Hilma af Klint. Historical facts are interwoven with pictorial descriptions and culminate in a utopian or dystopian future. Theoretical approaches from Queer Studies and Speculative Feminism are adopted to critically question the reception of af Klint's paintings and of herself. In a way, the essay can be seen as a digestion of digestion.
Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) é considerada uma pioneira da pintura abstrata. No entanto, ela própria dificilmente via as suas obras artísticas como produtos ou obras, mas sim como um sistema coerente. Assim, a contribuição apresenta e desdobra as pinturas de af Klint como uma versão alternativa do modernismo, um ecossistema ou sistema digestivo. Também aqui se aborda a origem mediúnica das pinturas: af Klint visualizava mensagens transcendentais. Olhando para a frente e procurando novas possibilidades (Bashkoff, 2018), ela pintava para um futuro que percepcionava de forma clarividente.
Em texto e imagens, a peça Metabolic Drawings – Or: Drawing metabolic desenvolve uma paisagem especulativa que segue as imagens e convicções de Hilma af Klint. Factos históricos são entrelaçados com descrições pictóricas e culminam num futuro utópico ou distópico. São adoptadas abordagens teóricas dos Estudos Queer e do Feminismo Especulativo para questionar criticamente a receção das pinturas de af Klint e de si própria. De certa forma, o ensaio pode ser visto como uma digestão da digestão.
Keywords
Hilma af Klint, Modernism, New Materialism, Critical History, Speculative Feminism
Some thoughts that appear in this essay were published with my essay 1. Cyborg* oder: Wer Hilma af Klint gewesen sein wird (2024). Some ideas I presented – with a different focus – at the 12th New Materialisms Conference Intersectional Materialisms. Diversity in Creative Industries, Methods and Practices at the National University of Ireland.
Funding details
Teresa Mayr's doctoral thesis, on which this article is based, is funded by Konrad Adenauer Foundation.
to start: the entangled
The ocean throws its wet limbs onto the land, the watery arms are lined with rocks. Steep granite cliffs plunge into the sea, trees and black tourmalines stand at an angle and fall over in slow motion (Sheldrake, 2020). They gleam matt in the cloudy, subdued light. I go further, angry spray splashes onto my mottled skin. Slowly and inconspicuously the land retreats. Its offshoots form rocky, craggy heaps and spit individual stones far into the undulating surface.
The stones, boulders and ledges, bear the claw marks of sea creatures, glaciers, and lion men. Ancient organisms rest in between; yellow and greasy, worm-like growths meander through mossy crevices. A tender nautilus grazes next to fossilised corals. Everything is bathed in yellow, blue and green; the light gently brushes the air and the ground (Fig. 1, 2, & 3). Soaked in dissolution and overcoming, amidst the apparent devastation, the promising traces snake along the cliffs and shimmer upwards. Like cells before division, the signs were the beginning, like lichen they flicker between the whole and the accumulation of parts (Goward, 2009).
The palms of my hands glide cracked over the warmth of the rocks. Lichen gathers under my nails and a woody tendril of ivy brushes against my thoughts, clinging to the cracks and crevices of my mind. Blinking, my gaze follows, and I remember: 'Klint' is an old Swedish word for cliff. The tendril digs deep and pushes behind my temples, the lichen creeps up my arms. Time passes, ancient memories rise and turn into whitecaps.
Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) communicates with lichens, mosses, stones and higher entities. She is a painter and medium. Her works are rooted in transcendental connections. Julia Voss, the biographer of af Klint, describes (2020) that the ‘High Ones' can be imagined as a plurality of God-like figures who convey messages to af Klint in spiritualist meetings. Together with the artist Anna Cassel (1860–1937) Hilma af Klint initiates these meetings. In total, the group consists of five women; they call themselves De Fem (The Five).
In trance and surrounded by her female friends and colleagues, af Klint absorbs information from other spheres and captures an inner appearance of things by drawing in an automated manner – which means to be in a state of unconsciousness while drawing. Circles, spirals and crosses appear on the paper, individual letters and words complete the forms. Hilma af Klint understands the term 'spirit' as a principle of movement that sets the world in flux: Everything material can plunge into a new exterior, transform, and dissolve (Birnbaum & Voss, 2024).
Briefly I shake the skin on my back and pluck some lichen from my elbow. In the distance I hear the screeching of geese. My legs search for the noise curiously and as we make our way through a few clouds of mist, my eyes recognise two swans, hanging in a wild embrace close to the ground. Their bodies are intertwined to form a heart-shaped organ, their necks twisted to caress each other. Suddenly the lovemaking disintegrates, the animals dissolve; they strike sparks and spray in orange fountains before they pupate and crystallise into geometric figures. The figures form symmetrical arrangements, deform and twist, again and again the sky splits nervously and casts the scene in vibrating colours (Fig. 4 & 5).
medium
In 1891 Hilma af Klint acts as a medium for the first time and consistently, she allows the contours of her consciousness to fade: The human being, blurred and fluid, is intertwined with other humans and non-human or beyond human entities. Animals, plants, metals, spaces, machines, all relate to each other and slide into each other. In a radical dissolution of the self, af Klint is countless many and never identical with herself; as a divine symbol, avatar and alter ego she pulsates in the rhythm of the tide, the movement of the planets and the swelling and cracking of the seeds in ripening fruits. She can look inside her body or into higher spheres, she remembers past incarnations, travels in time and contacts plant souls (Voss, 2020).
Hilma af Klint lives in a networked body, which isn’t marked and cut off from other bodies, but is – to quote Sheldrake – like the mycelium of a mushroom, “the living seam by which much of the world is stitched into relation” (2020, p. 47). She hears the vibration of roots in the relative fluidity beneath the earth and drinks the water of the sky, to borrow some of the marvellously absurd poetics of the author Céline Minard (2023, p. 132f). Further and in line with Virginia Woolf’s description of Orlando, af Klint’s whole-body tingles and vibrates, as if she was made up of a thousand wires on which a breath of air or wandering fingers play scales. She has the strangest sensations around her thigh bones. Her hair seems to stand on end. Her arms sing and buzz like the telegraph wires has been singing and buzzing for several years (1994, p. 168).
From the 19th century scientific discoveries, such as X-rays or radioactivity, visualise a previously invisible part of the world, technical innovations, such as wireless telegraphy, make the impossible plausible. In this context many people long for support and orientation as information becomes ever more numerous and knowledge ever more complex: From the mid-19th century modern spiritualism emerges and develops into a religious hype with different variations in the following years. The author Jennifer Higgie expresses very aptly: “If thoughts could be transmitted across time and space, then perhaps spirit communication was possible” (2023, p. 44).
Women often take a leading role in Spiritualist sessions, as medium, host or recorder. Spiritualism therefore not only enables personal freedom, but also creates and strengthens community, free of male control and criticism, as Higgie (2023) depicts. In this respect, Spiritualist circles also prove to be emancipatory germ cells that provide space to cast off social corsets, to disembody and explore.
Over the years the De Fem group changes, some women leave the group, others join. What remains, however, and represents a constant in af Klint's life, is sisterly solidarity and mutual support (naturally also interspersed with conflicts). Hilma af Klint and many of her friends remain unmarried; they detach security and love from the patriarchal institution of marriage and find it in each other, in nature, God and the truth. On the island of Munsö, located near Stockholm, the women also found a kind of community. They embed themselves in family structures and networks and resist patriarchal power structures, which are reproduced and manifested, for example, through the marital bond (Probyn, 1990).
Later, af Klint (HaK1039, p. 19) describes saving humanity from the destruction and hatred sweeping through Europe explicitly as a female mission:
29.12.33 Förutsägelser för mitt sista
arbete och silvrets makt (kvinnans) i
snart inträdande tid. Guldet (mannen)
kommer skall i henne se sin like. Kvinnan
kommer att övertaga ledning och
rädda mänskligheten.
Even if she does not actively politicise herself, I consider Hilma af Klint a feminist of her time: unimpressed by social expectations she meanders through worlds and figures. To better understand her complex position, seemingly fuelled by spiritual ideas and perhaps feminist attitudes, I adapt another passage from Virginia Woolf (a contemporary of af Klint): She has the wild idea of following the birds to the edge of the world and throwing herself on the soft turf, giving herself up to the cool embrace of the grass with delight. The scent of marsh myrtle and meadowsweet in her nose, the laughter of the crows echoes hoarsely in her sinuses. I have found my husband, she whispers. It is the moor. I am the bride of nature; my fingers should not wear a wedding ring; roots should twine around them instead (1994, p. 174).
Like mycorrhizal fungi, Hilma af Klint and her colleagues grow and thrive together. Like the arms of an octopus, fungal hyphae belong to one organism. At the same time, they can also make their own decisions and take different paths: “from the point of view of the network, mycelium is a single interconnected entity. From the point of view of a hyphal tip, mycelium is a multitude” (Sheldrake, 2020, p. 49).
for the temple
The automatic drawings that are developed during the spiritual sessions, serve as preparation for af Klint’s later mission: the ‘High Ones' inform Hilma af Klint that she is called to convey the world that lies above the representational world through painting (HaK1162, p. 96). They instruct her to expand the automatic drawings and create “astral paintings”, which are to be gathered under the title Paintings for the Temple (HaK418, p. 125). These paintings can also be seen in the context of Hilma af Klint's ideas on the salvation of humanity.
In 1906 she starts to work on this mission; gliding into the atmosphere and jumping from drawing to painting, af Klint creates the Paintings for the Temple in two phases: from 1906 to 1908 and from 1912 to 1915. In the end, the cycle comprises 193 paintings that divide into series and subgroups.
Right from the beginning, abstract forms burgeon and occasionally revert to figuration. Unstable and symbolic, af Klint's depictions oscillate between macrocosm and microcosm. There is no pure abstraction of colours and forms for their own sake; the images show the shaping of invisible connections and make them visible (Müller-Westermann, 2013, p. 45). Barely captured, the forms are already in the process of becoming something else. Birnbaum and Voss (2024) write that the work on the Paintings for the Temple winds from the representational to the non-representational, from the visible to the invisible, from matter to spirit. The paintings represent a hieroglyphic transcription of the secrets of the universe and a physical mediation that overcomes the separation between body and mind, as Pascal Rousseau (2013, p. 162) explains. In her notebooks this become even more clear, as af Klint rarely writes ‚I ‘.
The abstract elements arise from af Klint’s experience of being part of a boundless, raging river. This is exactly what the physicist Karen Barad seems to describe verbally: “to be a part is not to be absolutely apart but to be constituted and threaded through with the entanglements of part-ing” (2015, p. 406). Accordingly, Hilma af Klint's depictions do not cut things out of space and time. Like data networks or swallows' nests under barn roofs, they knot individual fibres and fragments; they are – adapting Barad's formulation – “a condensation of dispersed and multiple beings-times, where the future and past are diffracted into now, into each moment” (ibid., p. 411).
The visual vocabulary of af Klint is opaque and meticulous. It tells of various overlapping influences, such as arabesque, ornament, pure line or symbolism (Rousseau, 2013, p. 161). Matt surfaces accommodate a multitude of colours and confusing plays with proportions, symmetrically mirrored shapes are combined with text elements. Unseen forms arrange with botanical, organic and physical elements. A climbing plant becomes a spiral that clings to the words and codes of an unknown language. Soft and green spheres, mushrooms combine with algae, everything grows and progresses, mysterious flowers and mystical couples. The picture plane lacks spatial illusionistic parameters. It serves more as a substrate for the formal elements within the composition and is therefore comparable to the tradition of gold ground painting, the extravagant embrace and presence of surface, to quote from Max Rosenberg (2023, p. 85). The paintings do not open, denying the viewer the opportunity to enter a pictorial space, rather the paper appears like the surface of a light-coloured, shallow pond.
Curiously groping, Hilma af Klint discovers territories and lands beyond the edges of the physical, with calm force the paintings flood into the reality of the beginning of the 20th century. They function as an imaginary gateway through which human beings can step onto the threshold of a higher world (Voss, 2020, p. 202).
Hilma af Klint's depiction of transcendence, however, lacks any sacred clarity. Like subsurface worlds, her supernatural spheres are as diverse as the Amazon rainforest. They contain billions of tons of microbes, hundreds of times the collective weight of all the humans on the planet. Some specimens are thousands of years old, to quote Sheldrake (2020, p. 89).
breaching
According to Voss (2020), Hilma af Klint envisions a departure from the art world as she and we know it; she tries to think of art in a much larger framework, or even frameless: The Paintings for the Temple seem to have more in common with the speculative biology of Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) or the botanical depictions of the artist and researcher Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717) than with the strict system of Neoplasticism or the transcendental purity of Suprematism (Birnbaum, 2018, p. 213), which – from a western perspective – is inextricably linked with the beginning of abstraction.
Af Klint’s artistic work goes beyond the concept and idea of an art 'work': The Western modernist concept of a work is rooted in a monotheistic understanding of religion; it speculates on infinity and redemption. Based on a new image of the human being, which gives central importance to the conceptual individual, the image of the modern artist (Fischer-Hausdorf, 2019) begins to develop in the Renaissance. The creative human being creeps into the place of the divine giver; his products attain the significance as (art) works that is still valid today. Art establishes itself as the modern sole heir of religion (ibid.).
In contrast, Hilma af Klint does not experience herself as an individual to whom art exposes itself virginally. Her role as an artist is not based on a belief in a godlike artistic genius (the origin of the term ‘genius’ is Latin and means ‘generating power’), rather she sees herself as a mediator. She does not understand art as an autonomous work of a brilliant individual; often, af Klint does not even sign her works. Her concept of art seems to be loosely based on ecological or sympoietic systems, collectively producing and metabolizing, to follow the cultural scientist Hanne Loreck (2024). The Paintings for the Temple are created mediumistic and collectively, not as subjective self-interrogation, but as messages from the universe. They show the unity of all being, which is hidden behind the polarised, dual world in which we live (Müller-Westermann, 2013, p. 42) and bear witness to the practised overcoming of the ego and work in sisterly community (Loreck, 2015, p. 48).
Drawing on the art historian Elisabeth Hutton Turner (2009) and the writer Wendy Wheeler (2016) the artist Sara Lindeborg describes artistic abstraction as a way of visualising certain relationships and entanglements: “With this definition, abstraction becomes a sense of reality based on the experience of time, fragility of life, being in relation and co-dependency with other beings” (2017, p. 68). Lindeborg further writes that the artwork itself “participates in its environments with agency, not only with its internal visualization of the experience of the entanglements constituting the world, but also the artwork’s history and external relations” (ibid.). One can expect the art-organism to make its own ecology, to have an evolutionary history, to grow over time and to live in many minds.
With the Paintings for the Temple Hilma af Klint visualises the marvellously confusing constitution of a world that extends far beyond conventional and established categories and far beyond human sensory perception. To speak with Kim de l’Horizon (2022), the paintings are pictorial birth canals that open other, hyper-real and necessary realities. They show how everything changes, moves, and flows: Like damp forest soil, the paintings are a horizonless external gut. Everywhere there is digestion and salvage, flocks of bacteria surfing on waves of electrical charge; subterranean highways – slimy infective embrace – seething intimate contact on all sides (Sheldrake, 2020, p. 23). Visually, Hilma af Klint creates the utopia of a completely and inextricably intertwined world (Fig. 6 & 7).
Even though in the 21st century Hilma af Klint's paintings seem to fit comfortably into the “pantheon of modern art” (2023, p. 79) as Rosenberg notes, af Klint's artistic work is an alternative vision of modernism itself. Modernist conventions and tropes are used to evaluate her paintings, yet af Klint clearly rejects some of these conventions of abstraction and modern art (Rosenberg, 2023). Therefore, and following Briony Fer, we can understand the Paintings for the Temple as “breach in the system" (1997, p. 5).
digestion
Between 1916 and 1920, af Klint attempted to decipher and explain the Paintings for the Temple. In further series – for example Parsifal or The Atom Series (Fig. 9) – she documents her journey to the so-called ‘astral paintings’. They belong together, build on each other and form a kind of organism. Explicitly, af Klint compares her paintings to cells (HaK431, p. 65f):
Das Wirken in der Pflanzenwelt geht in
einem ruhigen Tempo vor; um z. B. das Weizenkorn
hervorzutreiben sind Monate nach Monat notwendig;
will der Mensch diese Arbeit beschleunigen, so wird
ein negatives Resultat die Folge davon.
Alles, was eine Art Sehnsucht nach der Ausgestal-
tung materieller Bilder bewirkt, was von innen kommt
als ein Zeugnis menschlicher Lebhaftigkeit, das ist dem Ge-
stalten der Zellen ähnlich. Dasjenige aber, was innerhalb
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
bestimmter Grenzen erstarrt, alles, was in dumpfer Unend-
lichkeit sich wiederholt, das ist der abnehmenden Wachs-
tumskraft ähnlich, die zum Tode der Pflanze führt.
Just as the Paintings for the Temple deal with a reconfiguration of the world, the images that are now being created reflect these creeping transformations. Hilma af Klint becomes the logistician of the pictorial cosmos she has created: visually and incredibly analytically, she attempts to penetrate every fibre and pore of the Paintings for the Temple. In this process Hilma af Klint turns out to be less of a code breaker than a code maker, less of a programmer of a spiritual path and more of a diagrammer of fictional abstract structures and processes, as Fer (2018, p. 167) writes.
A diagram is a schematic representation that serves as a rational tool to show how different things – worlds, thoughts, processes – work. Information is coded visually without having to appear naturalistic, even if realistic elements can be incorporated into the vocabulary (Lomas, 2013). At the same time, a diagram can represent how something is and how something should or will be; it relates different aspects to each other on a single visual level (Ryle, 2019). This opens an intermediate space: one state awaits the next, one form is no longer and the other is not yet. Hilma af Klint uses diagrammatic representations to visualise permanent and ongoing movement, change and transformation, combining theosophical ideas with scientific illustrations and Nordic mythology. As diagrams are not limited to a social or ontological reality, but also provide a surface on which data can be rearranged and reconfigured, they hold the potential to envision potential futures (ibid., p. 71).
Numbers, letters and pictorial elements coexist unimpressed in af Klint’s paintings. Insatiable in her search for a hermetic system, an almost alphabetical rhythm, she systematically creates a language that makes no claim to universal truth. She sorts and networks her images and her knowledge; without temporal and physical fixation, af Klint’s decoding of the cosmos is the speculative encoding of a new universe.
Animals, minerals and bacteria glide around weightlessly. Plants, supernatural and earthy at the same time, serve as mirrors, as “non-human others with subject-like sensibilities and abilities” (Loreck, 2024, p. 235). None of these organic forms have a representative purpose; everything that happens on earth reflects the wider spiritual world: violets stretch out shyly over a leaf (Fig. 8). Seeds and pollen cover squares, crosses and ellipses. Some swell into pocked lumps, full and plump; other forms lie dormant besides, embryonic like small breeding shells; small arrows indicate the direction of growth and show transformations. Everything seems to be permeated by a spirit, the individual fruiting bodies and stalks are its sensory organs, whereby the earth and its plant cover form a single living organism, as David Lomas writes (2013, p. 232). In the teeming totality of Hilma af Klint’s work – diagram, image, numbering – a huge, visual, ecological and model-like network emerges that traces and tracks down the delicate connections between categories and phenomena.
Hilma af Klint is convinced that humanity would be torn apart by materialism and binary thinking. The Paintings for the Temple were intended to open the possibility of alternative worlds to come. Utopias, imagined communities, speculative futures, and re-charted sex relations are among the genres and modes turned towards the exploration of revolutionary change at the beginning of the 20th century, to follow Jadranka Ryle (2022, p. 127).
For Hilma af Klint art is a method of investigation, a research tool, a salve for a broken world, as Jennifer Higgie (2023, p. 21) summarises. According to af Klint's mediumistic experience of drifting rather freely through a boundless space, her paintings function in different systems. Like post-autonomous artifacts, they live from mixtures, connections, cooperations – from the fiction that the best of different worlds can be cumulated, from the belief that something can become more robust the more aspects and criteria are considered (Ullrich, 2022). The Paintings for the Temple transcend the edges of art, leaping disorderly over all defensive trenches. They stretch boundaries and generate novel modes; they break open previously sealed politics and force a catharsis of conventions, norms and beliefs, as Rosa Menkman (2010) writes in the Glitch Studies Manifesto. Like convoluted tunnel systems, the corridors in an anthill, af Klint’s work undermines familiar histories and origins and unearths unsuspected entanglements (Fig. 10).
the end: future impact
Perhaps Hilma af Klint indeed tells of a possible future. Perhaps her paintings tell of a seductive time after mediation was no longer possible, the messengers returned with burns or frostbite that reached to their bones, the birds were plucked, the anteaters hung by their tongues and the cats of prey had their claws pulled, as Minard writes (2023, p. 142).
Confident and careful at the same time, I hear the scratching of af Klint’s pencil on the on the compressed flesh of dead trees, pustules are bulging under my skin. Her universe is a community. Wild garlic caresses chipmunks, a chameleon caresses a young pug. Apple trees lend a helping hand to nettle plants and streams feed mosses. Sand whisperingly grinds stones. The ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer writes: “We don't have to figure out everything by ourselves: there are intelligences other than our own, teachers all around us" (2013, p. 58). The world is less lonely when we immerse ourselves in its interconnectedness and lovingly stroke the fungi and lichen on our bodies.
Af Klint's future has long since dawned and inevitably, over time, my future will entangle with hers. Crackling and rustling penetrate my ear canals. Fur stretches and fine limbs unfold, the mouse pointer jerks over skins and hairs. Absently, my fingertips trace the lines and contours, sliding soapy past crosses and swallows. I stumble over acorns and shells. The antennae of insects I don't recognise lie between them in bloody pools. Breathing shallowly and routinely, I reach for the small body that connects me to everything. It lies cold and white in my hand, a bitten apple on its back. I stroke its coat with some of my index fingers.
Hilma af Klint's limbs flow with the swift currents of mountain streams, the fine hairs on her arms bristle with the fur of foxes. Bacteria graze her cheek; her scalp is ready for photosynthesis and blossoms like violets. Cellulose piles up into terrifying shapes. Woody, they partially ossify. Slender, thick scales hiss around, and ammonites hang between horsetails. Bodies condense into currents of writhing worms, she, I and we are, shining, intertwining and unravelling feverish masses of roundworm-like movement, never-ending, infinite, to speak through the science fiction author Stanisław Lem (2016, p. 238). The walls seem to breathe gently, the shell between ‘I’ and ‘you’ is opaque and fragile. What we are left with is ‘we’. The “multispecies recuperation” (2016, p. 27) – named by Haraway as a crucial aspect of a just future – is in full swing.
Figures
1. Primordial Chaos No. 3, oil on canvas, 53 x 36,5 cm, 1906, Hilma af Klint.
2. Primordial Chaos No. 8, oil on canvas, 53 x 36,5 cm, 1906, Hilma af Klint.
3. Primordial Chaos No. 13, oil on canvas, 53 x 36,5 cm, 1906, Hilma af Klint.
4. The Swan No. 5, oil on canvas, 150 x 150 cm, 1914/15, Hilma af Klint.
5. The Swan No. 3, oil on canvas, 150 x 150 cm, 1914/15, Hilma af Klint.
6. The Large Figure Paintings No. 9, oil on canvas, 148 x 108 cm, Hilma af Klint.
7. The Ten Largest No. 9, oil on canvas, 328 x 240 cm, 1907, Hilma af Klint.
8. Violet blossom with guidelines, watercolour, graphite and metallic paint on paper, 50 x 26,8 cm, 1919, Hilma af Klint.
9. The Atom No. 16, watercolour, 27 x 25 cm, 1917, Hilma af Klint.
10. Evolution No. 12, oil on canvas, 102 x 133 cm, 1908, Hilma af Klint
Pangaea-U, pencil (and marker) on paper, various formats, 2023/24, Teresa Mayr.
References
Primary Sources
Af Klint, Hilma. Unpublished manuscripts:
In this text I refer to unpublished manuscripts by Hilma af Klint (HaK), which are all in the archives of the Stiftelsen Hilma af Klint Verk in Stockholm, Sweden. The numbering of the manuscripts (source numbers) follows the system of the foundation.
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