New three-part radio work
TRANSMIT Volume I: What Trixie Could Not Tell the Inquisitor. 2025.
A work in three parts by Wendy Morris / produced by Guy Livingston / with Patricia Kaersenhout as Orlando, Valeria Mignaco as Trixie / in collaboration with Mariske Broeckmeyer, Alexander Cromer, Aurélie Nyirabikali Lierman, Colette Kinsella, Anders Jallén, Maria Sperling, Renée Turner and Elly Van Munster. Sound design by Erik Hense.
Listen to the radio work here
This radiowork tells the story of a gathering on a hilltop in the Pyrenees. The year is 1301. Béatrice de Planissoles, aka Trixie, has called together herbwomen, healers, midwives and shepherds. She needs their collected wisdom to answer a question that remains unanswered.
Beatrice de Planissoles stood before the Inquisition on the twenty-second day of August 1320 to answer charges of blasphemy, heresy and witchcraft. Presiding over the Inquisition was Bishop Jacques Fournier who was peculiarly interested in a love affair Beatrice once had with a powerful priest. Certain intimate details that Beatrice gave about this affair are at the heart of this story, for she told of a contraceptive pessary that the priest brought to their bed. What she could not tell the Inquisitor, for her lover would not divulge that information, was which plant the pessary contained.
The radio-work is a part of a larger enquiry into plants that have been useful to women and might have informed the practice of a 17th century midwife. Nothing of Importance Occurred. Recuperating a Herball for an enslaved Angolan midwife at the Cape is the larger project. Through research into African, European and Asian histories of plant contraceptive uses, the project explores bodies of knowledge that would have flowed to the Cape during the life of that enslaved Angolan midwife, Maaij Claesje.
Working with female voices from the countries within the geographies of the project (Angola, Brazil, South Africa, France, Netherlands, Indonesia, Portugal) a series of polyvocal works – duets, wind-songs, clandestine radio pieces – are being composed and performed to create the Herball for Midwife.
