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Manuscript. Archive of a Procession
Comprising Nine Folders and Numerous Diagrams. Manuscript is an archive of the research that lead to the Procession of Contraceptive Plants and Forgotten Midwives at Middelheim Museum in June 2023. The work consists of over a thousand parts: documents, diagrams, recipes, narratives, hysteries, errorpoems, duets across the Atlantic, working drawings for banners, patterns for pockets,…
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Recipe-as-Archive
Kerrievis, or Pickled Fish as it is also known, is a dish that entangles histories of forced migrations and travelling women. In Taati Niilenge’s Walvis Bay: Our Story (2024) Nangula Shikujele remembers the 1960s in Kuisebmond when fish were plentiful and fishers returning from sea would bring fish for the entire community. The neighbourhood would…
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Compounded
Navigating legacies of contract labour / Namibia / Compounded : Navigating legacies of contract labour emerges as a research project from the pressing presence of two albums left to me by my father, JF Morris. The first is a record of architectural works compiled by him between 1958 and 1960 when he was working in…
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Fieldguide Gathering
Polyvocal Reading of Fieldguide vol 1 with Orlando Preternaturalist, Nadia Kamies and Ten Voices at ESALA / Adam House Basement Theatre / Edinburgh / December 3, 2024
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Clandestine Radio
RADIO HUSH HUSH / HET HUIS PAVILION / MIDDELHEIM MUSEUM / ANTWERP / 2023 Radio Hush Hush transmits a muted chorus of female voices. The work performs fragmented knowledge of plant-based anti-fertility remedies that has been disappearing through the ages due to broken chains of vocal transmission. The work emerges from a project that investigates…
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Travelbreath
Intermediaries of the wind / BITTER WALK WIND SING / Ostend 2024 TRAVELBREATH : Lois Brochez Lumonga & Stine Sampers. Photos by Wannes Cré and Alexandra Crouwers. Wind instruments from collection of Tine Van Aerschot
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Bitter Walk Wind Sung
Viatrix and the Journeywomen lead the procession back to the beach. Photos by Wannes Cré
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Wind Sing
Viatrix sings the Midwife’s Herball into the Wind VIATRIX : Wen Hui Tsang. Photos by Wannes Cré.
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Taste Bitter
Great Yellow Gentian (Gentian lutea) grows in the hills of the Pyrenees. The root of the plant is considered the measure of bitterness and it has an ancient history of use by women as an emmenagogue. The root is the chief ingredient of the French liqueur Suze. Photos by Wannes Cré. De Langste Dag /…
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Bitter Walk Wind Sing
The Company of Fifty carried the Midwife’s Herball out to meet the winds of the North Sea Saturday 29, June 2024, Western Breakwater, Ostend, Belgium. Photos by Wannes Cré. De Langste Dag / Mu.Zee and KAAP Kunstencentrum
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A Certain Herb / Folder
Setting out a story of a contraceptive pessary, a plan to lend an ear to ethnobiologists, a series of Teas with Trixie, and a Parade in the Pyrenees. Photos by Wannes Cré. Design by Pauline Scharmann
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Bitter Walk Wind Sing
A PROCESSIONAL WORK THAT HONOURS BITTER PLANTS, FORGOTTEN MIDWIVES AND UNLICENSED FEMALE PRACTITIONERS In BITTER WALK WIND SING the Midwife’s Herball becomes an Ambulatory Library that journeys to lands-edge in Ostend to sing itself into the winds of the North Sea. There, carried on windstream, it will blow across the ocean and into the Bay of Luanda, into the…
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Call for participation
BITTER WALK WIND SING A Performative Procession DE LANGSTE DAG / OOSTENDE / KAAP & MUZEE Saturday 29 June / 18h This year I have been working on a new iteration of a processional work that was previously performed in the park of the Middelheim Museum. This iteration comes to Oostende (as part of De Langste…
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A Certain Herb
WHAT SHALL I DO IF I AM MADE PREGNANT BY YOU? I SHALL BE DISHONOURED AND LOST. Béatrice de Planissoles was being questioned by the Inquisitor in 1320 about her affair, twenty years previously, with a priest. She speaks quite openly about the contraceptive pessary that he would bring to their bed, though she could…
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An Ear to Ethnobiologists
SETTING UP A SERIES OF DIALOGUES WITH ETHNOBIOLOGISTS FOR THE PROJECT ‘A CERTAIN HERB’. Last week the project ‘A Certain Herb’ travelled to Marrakech, Morocco, to the Congress of the International Society of Ethnobiologists: Biodiversity and Cultural Landscapes: Scientific, Indigenous and Local Perspectives. Held at the Cadi Ayyad University in Marrakech, the Congress brought together…
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Midwife’s Herball Middelheim / Diagram
TABLING THE VIRTUES, SOMEWHAT ABBREVIATED, OF TWELVE PLANTS ONCE KNOWN TO BE VERY USEFUL TO WOMEN-IN-NEED, GROWING WILD, CULTIVATED, GATHERED OR TRADED – THEN, NOW, OR AT ONE TIME – IN AND AROUND THE PARK OF THE MIDDELHEIM MUSEUM
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Mary Lowndes and Suffragette banners
The form of the banners made for Procession at Middelheim Museum is influenced by the work of Suffragette artist Mary Lowndes. In 1909 she published her manifesto On Banners and Banner-making in the form of a pamphlet A banner is not a literary affair, it is not a placard; leave such to boards and sandwichmen.…
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A Hysterie of Guiné Weed and Sorrow Seed / lyrics
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Procession of Contraceptive Plants and Forgotten Midwives / video
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…
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Conversation between Wendy Morris and curator Pieter Boons
Conversation between Pieter Boons, curator of the Artistic Research Project, and Wendy Morris, in the studio at the Braem Pavilion, Middelheim Museum, May 10th, 2023. On Radio Hush Hush, the emergence of the Company and preparations for the Procession. P: You don’t work alone. You are working in or as a Company. Who is the…
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Installation / Radio Hush Hush / Middelheim Museum
Summer installation Middelheim Museum Radio Hush Hush was accompanied to het huis pavilion at Middelheim Museum by the Procession on June 24th. The form of this sound installation of female voices whispering contraceptive and abortive recipes references clandestine radio broadcasts. Comprising six finch cages each fitted with a speaker the work features the voices of…
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Belly Full of Blind Highways
A Letter by Wendy Morris / commissioned by KAAP and artist collective Dear, The third tape letter in the series of Belly full of blind highways is by Wendy Morris, written from the perspective of a Wandering Womb and addressed to the wild wort Savin. The letter is a call to resume a relationship with…
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Strain Against the Archives / Fieldguide Gathering / Cape Town
A gathering around Fieldguide #1, UNPICK, RESTITCH – Doilies, Medorahs, Labouring Plants by Nadia Kamies. Read more here
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There, Listening / Fieldguides Gathering / Kamiesberg
A three-day gathering in Kamiesberg/Namaqualand. Read more here
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Fieldguide Gathering / Strain Against the Archives
Deep Histories Fragile Memories,in collaboration with Cape Town Museum,invite you to Strain Against the Archives A Fieldguide Gathering& Polyvocal Reading with Ten Voicesfeaturing the essay of Nadia KamiesUnpick, 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…
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Rooted Encounters Symposium and Fieldguide Gathering
Rooted Encounters: Fields, Forests and Other Imaginings + Ecologies of Artistic Research. 8-9 November, 2022 Deep Histories Fragile Memories research group organizes a symposium on pluralist entanglements of artistic thinking with other research ecologies and considers art’s potential for making a stand within current challenges. Thinking along with philosophies of plant biology, with feminist critiques…
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The Return
We are picking a path northwards, along sandy tracks and mountain passes. This is an expedition to be sure. It ghosts an earlier, weightier, expedition that marched out of the Fort of Good Hope with flocks of sheep, herds of oxen, riding horses and donkeys, with wagons, light carts that carried one boat and two…
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Fieldguides for a Preternaturalist
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. Fieldguides for a Preternaturalist is designed to bring collaborators, audiences, and readers together…
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Exhibition / Ninguém teria acreditado / Pinacoteca Sao Paulo
The audio installation, A Hysterie of Guiné Weed and Sorrow Seed, is a part of the exhibition Ninguém teria acreditado at Pinacoteca, Sao Paulo. Curators Fernanda Pitta and Laurens Dhaenens. The exhibition is a second, larger, iteration of No One Would Have Believed, that ran at Netwerk Aalst a year ago. The exhibition recuperates the historical…
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A Hysterie of Guiné Weed and Sorrow Seed
A duet across the Atlantic of two esteemed weedworts with long histories of use as anti-fertility plants in West Africa and Latin America / in production
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Lost Volumes
Sixty stories will make up a set of Volumes, twelve in all. Lost Volumes, scattered pages, loosely bound, never having had any prior wholeness
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Travelogue of the Wandering Womb, Her Fantastic Encounters and Curious Utterings
As a Thread Winding Backwards, an Audio Eerie + Prologue + A Tale of Eleven Births + The Ghosts of my Friends Wendy Morris & Mariske Broeckmeyer / 2020 / Exhibition ‘No One Would Have Believed’ / Netwerk Aalst An audio-eerie in two parts: First, a dissolving into a constellation of organs and entities, human plant…
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Exhibition
NO ONE WOULD HAVE BELIEVED – NIEMAND ZOU HEBBEN GELOOFD – PERSONNE N’AURAIT CRU HENRIQUE ALVIM CORRÊA, H. G. WELLS, RUNO LAGOMARSINO, WENDY MORRIS & MARISKE BROECKMEYER 12.12.2020 14.03.2021 No one would have believed is an exhibition that brings art, popular culture and politics together. It focuses on the work by two contemporary artists, Wendy Morris – working…
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Emissary to the Past
The suitcase stands empty in the studio. The thousand letters once crammed into it have been sorted by date, logged, read, some typed up and others photographed. Muriel Leysen, the owner of the case and its contents, died in Johannesburg in the 1970s. The father of the artist has been guardian of the suitcase for…
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