Author: Wendy Morris
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The Company Ghosts
The ghosts of countless women who resorted to plant remedies to abort The ghosts of those who provided this knowledge to women in need They weren’t then, but they are now / Ethel, Violet, Olive and Bliss / Dulcie, Hazel, Thelma and Pearl.
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Suikerbossie to Suskewiet / Radio Hush Hush
Part 2 / Stradanus engraving of finch-trapping near Antwerp Vinkenjacht met net Op deze prent naar ontwerp van Johannes Stradanus (circa 1564) is te zien hoe mannen vinken vangen met gebruik van slagnetten. Rondom de netten staan kooitjes met lokvinken. In de late middeleeuwen was de jacht, vis- en vogelvangst strikt voorbehouden aan de adel.…
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Scores / Radio Hush Hush
RADIO HUSH HUSH COMPRISES SIX SONIC WORKS IN SIX FINCH CAGES. THE ‘SCORES’ (HERE IN DRAFT FORM) DETAIL THE COMPILATION OF EACH TRACK.
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Clandestine Radio / Radio Hush Hush
Radio Hush Hush broadcasts from the past and the present. An experimental radiowork it mimics formal elements of clandestine shortwave radio stations such as ‘the Buzzer’ and ‘the Pip’. Radio Hush Hush takes the form of a furtive radio work that broadcasts, in fragmented form, information on abortifacients, emmenagogues and contraceptives as well as common…
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Suikerbossie to Suskewiet / Radio Hush Hush
Part 1 / Suikerbossie is a ghoema liedjie, a South African folk song, that has its origins in Indonesia and was brought to the Cape by enslaved individuals in the 17th and 18th century who developed the Afrikaans version of the song. ‘Suikerbossie’ refers to a sweetened dummy for an infant. The song developed as…
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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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Midwife’s Herball Middelheim / The Virtues
The Virtues are twelve banners for twelve anti-fertility plants that make up the Midwife’s Herball of Middelheim. The embroideries on each of the banners, stitched onto ‘pockets’ that resemble a uterus and ovaries, are made by Wessam Ashour and Louzan Khalikova. The illustrations are taken from woodcuts made for Leonhart fuch’s The New Herbal (1543)…
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Mary Lowndes and Suffragette banners
The form of the banners made for Procession at Middelheim Museum is heavily 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…
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A Hysterie of Guiné Weed and Sorrow Seed / lyrics
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PROCESSION / Manuscript for a Librarian
MANUSCRIPT IS AN ARCHIVING OF THE UNIVERSE THAT LEADS UP TO THE PROCESSION. THROUGH DIAGRAMS, ILLUSTRATIONS, LISTS, NOTES, LETTERS, EXPLANATIONS, CONNECTIONS, FABRIC SAMPLES, COSTUMES, MAPS, SCENARIOS, PATTERNS FOR POCKETS, DESCRIPTIONS OF BANNERS, HAUNTINGS, ROLES AND ENTOURAGES, TEXTS FOR SCOLDS, AND INCLUDING THE CLANDESTINE PRESENCE OF THE COMPANY, IT IS A PULLING BACK TO CATCH THE…
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Manuscript for a Librarian / The Company / The Wandering Womb
Manuscript for a Librarian is an archive of work in the project Nothing of Importance Occurred that leads up to the Procession of Contraceptive Plants and Missing Midwives (June 2023). Included in this folder are lyrics and texts made by Wandering Womb. They include The Errant Womb (2019), the tape letter Dear Savin, Rough Herb…
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Manuscript for a Librarian / The Company
Diagram of organs and entities of The Company that is a part of Manuscript for a Librarian / 2024.
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The Dissolving
My body is breaking up / my-body-is-breaking-up / and each sense, each organ, is going out to work. The Dissolving is an audio-work through which The Company emerges as voice. As a written work it also becomes a part of the The Lost Volumes (Vol X. The Company) Wendy Morris and Mariske Broeckmeyer / Like…
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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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Journeywomen / Procession
Photo’s by Aldo Smith, student at LUCA School of Arts Brussels, of the Journeywomen passing through the circle of banners during the Procession
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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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Procession / Return Retrace Replant / Middelheim Museum
Performative Procession of Contraceptive Plants, Forgotten Midwives and Herb Women / Middelheim Museum On Saturday 24/06 we held a Procession of Contraceptive Plants, Forgotten Midwives and Herb Women. Sixty participants took part by carrying the banners, attending to the plants, uttering the stitched texts, singing solo in the forest, and whistling in the field. We…
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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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! Call to participate !
Since January Wendy has been working in commission of the Middelheim Museum on a new performance work in which the virtues of medicinal plants growing in the park – and more specifically indigenous contraceptive plants – are central. On June 24 this work, which is a procession and an ambulatory library, will wind its way…
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Belly full of blind highways
KAAP announces the upcoming release of four tape letters / We’re happy to announce our collaboration with artist initiative Dear, with whom we have developed Belly full of blind highways: a series of four tape letters by four commissioned artists. As a precursor to the digital voice note, audio letters, commonly recorded on cassette tape, hold an…
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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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Fieldguide Gatherings / South Africa
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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An Unruly Procession of Contraceptive Plants / taking shape in the Braem pavilion
https://middelheimmuseum.be/en/AOP
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Artistic Research Project / Reading the Landscape / Middelheim Museum
The Artistic Research Project is a new program of the Middelheim Museum in which artists are invited to embed their research in the Museum. The Museum invites artists for the period of a year to explore research questions that relate both to their own practices and to the space, place and history of the Museum. Wendy Morris…
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Belly full of blind highways
Dear, and KAAP commission four audio letters by writers Fred Moten (US), Wendy Morris (SA-BE), Mo’min Swaitat aka. Palestine Sound Archive/Majazz Project (PS-UK) en Laura Grace Ford (UK). Dear, en KAAP werken samen aan de publicatie van vier audio-brieven waarvoor wij vier kunstenaars, dichters en auteurs uitnodigen om elk hun eigen brief bij te dragen.…
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Hysteries / Plant of the Damned / Walk
Rooted Encounters / Middelheim Museum / November 9 2022 Walking Vulvaria and Plant of the Damned to the Garden of Promise. Nothing of Importance Occurred. Recuperating a Herball for a 17th century Midwife.
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Fieldguide Gathering
Ambulatory Libraries + Join us for the first Fieldguide Gathering, entitled Ambulatory Libraries, at Middelheim Museum on November 9th. Participating are Rachel O’Donnell, Els Viaene, Wendy Morris, Nele Möller, Lukas De Clerck, and the Fifteen Voices. Definitely present will be Lucky Herb, or the Plant of the Damned depending on your viewpoint, and Vulvaria. It…
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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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Artist Talk (un)common values
Artist Talk connected to the exhibition (un)common values at National Bank of Belgium https://www.nbb.be/en/articles/uncommon-values-contemporary-art-collection-national-bank-belgium-celebrating-its-50th More information: www.nbb-expo.be
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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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Gather, a Rehearsal
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…
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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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Fieldguides for a Preternaturalist
read more
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Lost Volumes
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An Affecting Narrative
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Abstract: The seeds of Wild Carrot / print / 2021
Work / Abstract: The seeds of Wild Carrot / / 2021 / Multiple of 6 / Blue print on foxed pages of La Pluie et le Beau Temps by Arthur Mangin
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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: To the Copper Mountains
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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No One Would Have Believed
Exhibition by Wendy Morris and Runo Lagomarsino 14.11.2020 – 13.02.2021 No one would have believed is an exhibition that brings art, popular culture and politics together. It focusses on the work by two contemporary artists, Wendy Morris and Runo Lagomarsino, that rethinks the legacy of colonialism and science fiction, departing from the work of Brazilian born artist Henrique…
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Whoever says sugar says Brazil
Whoever says sugar says Brazil. Whoever says Brazil says Angola. 17th century aphorism
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Eleven births backwards
!midwif aka ‘Maaij’ Claesje of Angola, mother of Sara Van Gijselen, who is mother of Dorothea Oelofse, who is mother of Roelof Campher, who is father of Roelof Campher, who is father of Johanna Sophia Jacoba Campher, who is mother of Catharina Dorothea Meeding, who is mother of Catherine Hooper, who is mother of Robert…
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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…