Deep Histories Fragile Memories,
in collaboration with Cape Town Museum,
invite you to
Strain Against the Archives
A Fieldguide Gathering
& Polyvocal Reading with Ten Voices
featuring the essay of Nadia Kamies
Unpick, Restitch: Doilies, Medorahs and Labouring Plants
In this essay from the chapbook series Fieldguides for a Preternaturalist, author and researcher Nadia Kamies narrates an archive-of-the-ordinary that includes hand-crocheted doilies, intricately embroidered medorahs, and a plant held for generations within a family, as material objects and entities through which to rethink the threads that bind us.
Programme
14h00: Welcome and roundtable introductions of participants and guests
14h30: Outline of the Fieldguides and the Nothing of Importance Project by Wendy Morris
15h30: Invocation by Ugandan/South African poet and storyteller Philippa Namutebi Kabali Kagwa followed by a Polyvocal Reading with Ten Voices led by Nadia Kamies
16h30: Refreshments and informal discussions
DATE: Saturday 15 April 2023
TIME: 14h00-18h00
VENUE: Cape Medical Museum Old City Hospital Complex, Portswood Road, Green Point
RSVP: info@nadiakamieswriter.com
Nadia Kamies was born in Cape Town at the foot of Table Mountain, not too far from the confluence of the Black and Liesbeeck Rivers, to Hope Lorraine Kleinsmith of Woodstock and Abdullah Kamies of District Six. Her early years have been shaped by traversing the spaces between the homes of her maternal grandparents in Walmer Estate and her paternal grandmother in District Six. Before she found her way to story-telling, she worked with children as an occupational therapist, an aromatherapist and a yoga teacher. Nadia publishes inReclamation magazine and Perspectives of a Perennial. Her book, Off Centre and Out of Focus: Growing up ‘Coloured’ in South Africa, (Fourthwall Books) will appear in 2023.
Wendy Morris was born in Namibia, grew up in South Africa, and lives in Belgium. She is an artist, researcher and professor at Luca School of Arts, Brussels, and the Faculty of Arts, KU Leuven, and founder of the interdisciplinary deep histories fragile memories research cluster. Her work has a double focus on historical and transdisciplinary research and on the artistic and written forms in which this research manifests itself. Her current artistic practice comprises Travelogues, polyvocal Herbals, Audio-Eeries and Duets, clandestine Radioworks, and the Fieldguides. Wendy is currently Artist-Researcher-in-Residence at Middelheim Museum, Antwerp, and preparing an Unruly Procession of Contraceptive Plants for the Museum for June 2023.
