Polyvocal Reading of Fieldguide vol 1 with Orlando Preternaturalist, Nadia Kamies and Ten Voices at ESALA / Adam House Basement Theatre / Edinburgh / December 3, 2024
The Company of Fifty carried the Midwife’s Herball out to meet the winds of the North Sea. De Langste Dag. Saturday 29, June 2024, Western Breakwater, Ostend, Belgium. Bitter Walk Wind Sing is a part of Wendy Morris’s Recuperating a Herball for an enslaved Angolan Midwife at the Cape (2018- ) Photos by Wannes Cré. De Langste Dag / Mu.Zee and KAAP Kunstencentrum
The Procession is a part of Nothing of Importance Occurred, a project of recuperation of a Herball for a 17th century Angolan midwife at the Cape, South Africa. This project explores the knowledge that midwives and women of the 17th century had of plants that controlled fertility. At the heart of the story is the person on Maaij Claesje, an enslaved woman in the VOC (Dutch East India Company) slave lodge, Cape Town, who was, eventually, able to negotiate her emancipation … Read More
In residence at Middelheim Museum, Wendy Morris is exploring how knowledge of plant-based contraception has been passed down clandestinely for centuries. Curator Pieter Boons spoke with the artist about the many themes in her work: about our lost relationship with plants, about contraception, loss of language and personal connections to histories of enslavement. P: But you don’t work alone. You are working in or as a Company. Who is the Company? First of all the name of the ‘Company’ refers … Read More
A gathering around Fieldguide #1, UNPICK, RESTITCH – Doilies, Medorahs, Labouring Plants by Nadia Kamies. UNPICK, RESTITCH narrates an archive of the ordinary. It insists on story-telling as method. There are family photographs, hand-crocheted doilies and medorahs – Nadia’s grandmothers’ craftwork – rituals and traditions. There is the Rose of Jericho or Flower of Maryam, a plant that emerges as an analogy for midwives, birth and labour, travelling and displacement, rebirth and resurrection, with deep connections to disempowered voices throughout … Read More
A three-day gathering in Kamiesberg/Namaqualand. We started the gathering on the first day with a joint reading in Paulshoek of Fieldguide #3 – There Listening: Plant Perspectives on Healing and Power/’n Plant se Perspektiewe van Krag en Genesing, written by Joshua B Cohen and Johanna ‘Marianna’ Lot. Each participant wore a pocket with stitched plant names in Afrikaans, Dutch and Nama that appear in the text of the Fieldguide. Participants of the reading/gathering in Paulshoek were Cornelius Brand, Willem Brand, … Read More
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
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In April deep histories fragile memories are organizing two sets of Gatherings in South Africa in collaboration with the authors of the Fieldguides.
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The Artistic Research Project is a new program of the Middelheim Museum in which artists are invited to embed their research in the Museum. … Read More
An ambulatory library of ten chapbooks that mark a return from Cape Town to Angola. Volumes 1-3 (2022) mark the first leg, from a shrine on Signal Hill to a village in the Kamiesberg, Namaqualand. The guides are Nadia Kamies, Rachel O’Donnell, Joshua Cohen and Johanna Lot. Volumes 4-6 (2023) will narrate the second leg of the return through Namibia from Walvis Bay to Rundu. Volumes 7-10 (2024) will follow the journey through Angola to the port of Luanda. Fieldguides for a Preternaturalist is designed to bring … Read More
A Reading with the Bodies in the medicinal garden of ‘t Gasthuys. On March 25 the Bodies gathered at the ancient medicinal garden of the museum ‘t Gasthuys, Aalst, for a reading-as-rehearsal of Rachel O’Donnell’s essay Apacina: a Contemporary Herbal and Ambiguous Tale, soon to be published in the series Fieldguides for a Preternaturalist. Readers were Pieternel Vermoortel, Brunilda Pali, Vanessa Müller, Lucile Desamory, Nele Möller and Wendy Morris. The event was a part of the Bodies project of Netwerk Aalst. The Fieldguides … Read More
A Hysterie of Guiné Weed and Sorrow Seed, a duet across the Atlantic. Audio installation, cloths of The Company Ghosts, Song Sheet. Exhibition Ninguém teria acreditado, Pinacoteca, Sao Paulo. 04/12/21-04/03/22. Read more
Announcement / Exhibition by Wendy Morris and Runo Lagomarsino / Curated by Laurens Dhaenens and Fernanda Pitta / Netwerk Aalst 14.11.2020 – 13.02.2021 This is the announcement for an upcoming exhibition at Netwerk Aalst. Three deep histories fragile memories members are involved. Laurens Dhaenens is co-curating, and Mariske Broeckmeyer and Wendy Morris are together composing an Audio-Eerie for the exhibition. No one would have believed is an exhibition that brings art, popular culture and politics together. It focusses on the work … Read More