Welcome to the site of the deep histories fragile memories artistic research cluster embedded in Intermedia (LUCA School of Arts, Brussels).

Research of the members of dhfm engages with the recuperation of marginalised histories, with ecologies and situated enquiries, with experimental writing, listening, and the shaping of new narratives. This website announces dhfm publications, events and news, and the Fieldguides for a Preternaturalist (dhfm/K. Verlag).

Background image: Ernst Haeckel, via Wikipedia.org

Recent posts


This Dying Goat is a School / Indigenous Gaze: Decolonising Visual Cultures / Archivo Papers Publication

“Without land, there is no cinema.” – Tikmū’ūn filmmaker Isael Maxakali. I warmly invite you to discover a diversity of contributing authors for the beautiful issue launched by Archivo Papers: Journal of Photography and Visual Culture on the theme of “Indigenous Gaze: Decolonising Visual Cultures.” As guest editors Roberto Romero and Polina Golovátina-Mora open the issue, “the screen is not a neutral space…

Read more This Dying Goat is a School / Indigenous Gaze: Decolonising Visual Cultures / Archivo Papers Publication

! 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 through the park – and…

Read more ! Call to Participate !

Reading Fish Teachers with Pacific Ocean writer Syaman Rapongan / Upcoming seminar / LUCA Brussels / May 31st

The deep histories fragile memories research group and the Lieven Gevaert Research Centre for Photography, Art and Visual Culture are pleased to invite writer Syaman Rapongan of the Pacific island of Pongso no Tao to lead a collective reading of interspecies stories from his novel Eyes of the Sky. As an Indigenous writer-fisherman and in resistance to Taiwanese settler colonial operations, he explores ways fish…

Read more Reading Fish Teachers with Pacific Ocean writer Syaman Rapongan / Upcoming seminar / LUCA Brussels / May 31st

The Forest Echoes Back @ Reveil 2023

Reveil is a 24-hour live radio transmission of the dawn chorus around the globe. >>>>>>> Listen here <<<<<<< “Reveil (2014—) is a collective production by streamers at listening points around the earth. Starting on the morning of Saturday 6 May in South London near the Greenwich Meridian, the broadcast will pick up feeds one by one, tracking the sunrise west…

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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. 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…

Read more Strain Against the Archives / Fieldguide Gathering / Cape Town

There, Listening / Fieldguides Gathering / Kamiesberg

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…

Read more There, Listening / Fieldguides Gathering / Kamiesberg

Listening Fields #1

Mark the date! April 7th, 2023 – 12 noon The first episode of Listening Fields will be broadcasted on Radio Panik. Listening Fields is a bi-monthly radio show that oscillates around various listening and field recording practices and the discourse surrounding them. We invite you to come listen to buzzing, squealing, chattering, fluttering – sounds that tell stories about the…

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Rooted Encounters / Fields, Forests and Other Imaginings

Symposium and Fieldguide Gathering / Nov 8 & 9 / 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 of biotechnology, colonialism, and science, with histories of plants out…

Read more Rooted Encounters / Fields, Forests and Other Imaginings

Conference / The Listening Academy

The Listening Academy was held from August 29 – September 4, 2022 at the experimental contemporary art and music space Iklectik in London. The Academy was organised by Lucia Farinati, curator, researcher and writer, co-author of The Force of Listening (2017) and Brandon LaBelle, artist, writer and theorist, author of Acoustic Justice: Listening, Performativity, and the Work of Reorientation (2021).…

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Day of Encounters: Constructed Histories, Conflicted Memories

A day of encounters, presentations and screenings on the historic & contemporary entanglements b/w architecture urban history & colonialism While debates about the conflicted heritage of colonialism have gained momentum worldwide, this conference day confronts the fields of architectural history, art, film and heritage studies with the difficult question of the memorialization of colonial sites and architectures in both Belgium…

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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. Volumes 4-6 (2023) will narrate the second leg of the return through Namibia from Walvis Bay to Rundu. Volumes…

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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 field canons, and a calash.…

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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 were Pieternel Vermoortel, Brunilda Pali, Vanessa Müller,…

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Cement and Sacraments

A talk by architectural historian Ellen Rowley on Friday May 20th, introduced by the Department of Ultimology.  This talk is part of research by Fiona Hallinan on the coming into being of Ultimology, or the study of endings, and the development of a film that looks closely at a rupture, the demolition of a Dublin church.Friday May 20th 18:00 BrusselsFor more…

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Exhibition Cripur Cripour

Cripur Cripour is a nonperformance on migraine and voice, wavering between interactive opera and installation art. Through personal narratives and intimate vocal sounds, singer and sound-artist Mariske Broeckmeyer guides the audience into the blackened scenery of the migraine lands. When this neurological syndrome rages at full force, a throbbing headache and an all-consuming nausea reduce the migraineur to an immobile…

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Exhibition / Ninguém teria acreditado / Pinacoteca Brazil / Dhaenens, Morris & Broeckmeyer

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 work of Brazilian-Belgian artist Alvim Corrêa with special attention bestowed on his renowned illustrations of HG Wells’ War of the Worlds. The curators, Fernanda Pitta and Laurens Dhaenens invited ten contemporary artists to respond…

Read more Exhibition / Ninguém teria acreditado / Pinacoteca Brazil / Dhaenens, Morris & Broeckmeyer

Publication / British Experimental Women’s Fiction, 1945—1975

Slipping Through the Labels Our edited collection, featuring work on writers including Storm Jameson, Stevie Smith, Rosamund Lehmann, Anna Kavan, Elizabeth Bowen, Eva Figes, Eva Tucker, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Brigid Brophy, Ann Quin, Christine Brooke-Rose, Shelagh Delaney and Buchi Emecheta, is now out! Description: This book scrutinizes a range of relatively overlooked post-WWII British women writers who sought to demonstrate that…

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Publication / You and I Don’t Curate on the Same Planet

On template exhibitions and opportunistic art For the ‘Experiences’-section of the academic journal Image[&]Narrative I published an essay on my experience of the Taipei Biennial 2020 “You and I Don’t Live on the Same Planet” in the Taipei Fine Arts Museum in Taiwan. This text explores a mental visit through the contemporary arts exhibition star curated by Bruno Latour and…

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Research Talk / Fiona Hallinan

Fiona Hallinan gives a talk on the form of the radio essay guided by ‘Inside the Department of Ultimology’ a radio essay she co-created with curator Kate Strain / Research in the Arts class. 19/10/21. In this presentation Hallinan will explore the form of the radio essay, beginning with her experience in co-creating this work for the Irish national broadcaster…

Read more Research Talk / Fiona Hallinan

Symposium / Sliding Together

Symposium on the occasion of the defence of Maria Gil Ulldemolin’s doctoral thesis Collapse: A Warburgian Autotheory of Impacted Interiorities and Folding Bodies / UHasselt / Sept 16 With Barbara Baert, Edith Dekyndt, Hannah Van Hove, Wendy Morris and Mia You in the morning and Maria Gil Ulldemolins in the afternoon.

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Publication / Fieldguides for a Preternaturalist

Suspended between the mundane and the miraculous. The Fieldguides are an upcoming publication series of single-essay chapbooks. They are a deep histories fragile memories collaboration with the Berlin publisher K Verlag, kunsthal Netwerk Aalst, and LUCA. The fieldguides are funded in the first year as a start-up project by LUCAbreakout. The first three issues will appear in 2022. Fieldguides for…

Read more Publication / Fieldguides for a Preternaturalist

The Astronaut Metaphor

The Astronaut Metaphor is a three year programme of Netwerk Aalst in which a group of artists, curators, writers and researchers are invited to reflect on forms of governance whilst simultaneously infiltrating Netwerk Aalst’s programme and institutional model. The participants in the programme, the Bodies, are: Nick Aikens, Bianca Baldi, Jeremiah Day, Laurens Dhaenens, Dora Garcia, Agnieszka Gratza, Vanessa Joan…

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Meeting / dhfm

Deep histories fragile memories meeting on the occasion of the No One Would Have Believed exhibition at Netwerk Aalst 26/02/21 Our expanded research cluster met for the first time this year, in part virtually, in part in person. Anja Veirman joined via zoom from Ghent, Renée Turner from Rotterdam, Hannah Van Hove and Laurens Dhaenens from Brussels. Alexandra Crouwers, Mariske…

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Funding / Multi-stakeholder Grant

Multispecies justice and repair: Forging epistemic encounters between Belgium and South Africa. Researchers Belgium: dr. Wendy Morris (KU Leuven, Luca) & dr. Brunilda Pali (KU Leuven). Researchers South Africa: dr. Clifford Shearing (UCT), Dr. Annette Hübshle (UCT), Ashleigh Dore (Endangered Wildlife Trust). The research project aims at conducting collaborative research between Belgium and South Africa on the topics of multispecies…

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Writing / Lost Volumes

At the edge of a field in West Flanders is a strange construction. A box of sorts, a brown, corrugated iron cabin with a steeply sloping roof that faces across fields towards a narrow channel of river. The construction has but a single window, vertical, two fists wide, that runs up the entire front face of it. From the field…

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5 Minute presentation The Postresearch Condition

The 2021 EARN/NWO Smart Culture Conference took place January 26 – 30, 2021. It was organized in collaboration with HKU University of the Arts Utrecht, NWO (Dutch Research Council), and BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht. For the Value round table workshop (co-organized by Luca School of Arts Brussels) I was asked to prepare a 5 minute presentation on the…

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Publication / Impulsive Incantations – Voicing Migraine / JAR

This article by Mariske Broeckmeyer is published in the latest edition of the peer reviewed Journal for Artistic Research. When migraine arrives, not only the body suffers. The voice too is impacted by a condition that introduces itself with such great force. As a migraine-suffering singer I notice these changes and become fascinated by the aesthetics of a failing voice…

Read more Publication / Impulsive Incantations – Voicing Migraine / JAR

Practice Sharing

Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group: Language-based Artistic Research. The new Special Interest Group: Language-based Artistic Research has been launched with an online presentation of expanded approaches to language-based practice within the field of artistic research. Over 70 individuals and collaborations are included in this first ‘sharing’: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/835089/1021562 The intent has been to reflect on how language-based artistic research is…

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The Taste of Sea Snakes

The greatest coincidence happened. I enjoyed my first free dive in the ocean surrounding Pongso no Tao – also known as Orchid Island or Lanyu. I tried to relax my body for the final breath-up, executed a duck dive and started finning towards the bottom of the sea while holding my breath. Then, startingly, at ten meters deep, I saw…

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Lecture / Dystopian Optimism, or that glint of water through the trees

In the context of an academic exchange with the National Dong Hwa University in Hualien (Taiwan), I gave a talk on November 12, 2020. It was exciting to exchange ideas with professor Jen-yi Hsu and the English Literature students, most of whom were following a dystopian literature class focused on the wonderful science fiction writings by Octavia E. Butler. During…

Read more Lecture / Dystopian Optimism, or that glint of water through the trees

Publication / Forum+

In the latest edition of the artistic research journal Forum+ three dhfm members, Hannah Van Hove, Joeri Verbesselt and Mariske Broeckmeyer, publish their writings. Hannah Van Hove: In vijf reflecties verkent Hannah Van Hove, vanuit haar eigen schrijf- en onderzoekservaringen, wat het betekent om in het onderzoeksproces de ‘ik’, meestal ogenschijnlijk weggecijferd in academische teksten, te benadrukken. Een centrale vraag…

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No One Would Have Believed

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.…

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Music /// Botanical Bodies / Kaap

Botanical Bodies herwerkt de muziek van Hildegard von Bingen in een gedurfde en eigentijdse geest. Deze visionaire, genezer, botanicus, feministe en componist uit de 12e eeuw creëerde fascinerende werken met vocale muziek terwijl ze werd gekweld door migraine.Dit lichamelijke lijden werd beschouwd als de bron van haar hemelse inspiratie.Samen met violist Hendrike Scharmann brengt zangeres Mariske Broeckmeyer eengroep muzikanten samen…

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Conference / Ethnographic Returns

Anja Veirman was selected to present her research project “Experimental ethnographic participative methods as forms of collective knowledge production. Senufo mud cloth production and the making of new narratives” at The Ethnographic Returns Conference of The Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg/School of Global Studies University of Gothenburg in June. The video she made in lieu of the live presentation…

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Launch of new site : midwif

Midwif is a new blog, a sub-blog of dhfm, that connects an international cluster of artists, writers and researchers around the figure of midwif as a knot at the centre of an entanglement of ideas around women’s medicinal plant knowledge and practices, and histories of their attempts at reproductive autonomy. The context of this collaborative investigation is the ongoing artistic research project…

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Tableau Vivant 2019-2020

Wan-Lun Yu and Joeri Verbesselt, in collaboration with Mei-Ning Huang After summer residencies in P.A.R.T.S. and GC Nohva (through VGC) in Brussels, we moved with the Tableau Vivant-project to Taiwan.In December 2019 we prepared for the presentation of this ongoing research and performance project about the depictions of the female figure and nature in Western Art History. The 50-minutes black…

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Hortus+Herbarium

A stone’s throw from the site of last year’s Fantastic Encounter with the Matriarchal Ginkgo is ‘t Gasthuys, the city museum of Aalst, and an enclosed garden that was once the medicinal garden of this ancient hospital. Replanted as a medicinal garden a few years back by Bart Backaert, this garden is now to become a Nicholas Culpeper Garden of…

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The Three Motions of Loom

The exhibition ‘The Three Motions of Loom’ opened Sunday, December 15 at the Antwerp Art Pavilion (next to the MAS Museum) in Antwerp. It’s running until February 16 2020. Jeroen Olyslaegers read from his novel-in-progress ‘Wildevrouw’, which was the starting point for the project. Publisher Demian presented a limited edition. Zaaltekst (in Dutch) ??? ????? ??????? ?? ??????????????? ?????????, ???…

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Impulsive Incantations

The migraine patient lives a nomadic life. In an almost ritualistic way she trudges between two worlds – a ceremonial procession that goes back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Health unavoidably induces sickness and only sickness will lead her back to health. She oscillates, fluctuates, pendulates and is therefore fated to live in constant adaptation to an ever-changing state of wellbeing.

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Is it lovely yet?

in the archives of Christine Brooke-Rose, Anna Kavan, Ann Quin and Muriel Spark 1. It is the summer of 2014 and I’m at the Olin Library at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. I am researching three novelists for my PhD. One of them, Ann Quin, doesn’t have her own archive. I locate papers of hers, scattered around, in the…

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Dystopian Optimism

Our future imagination suffers from an impasse between technological optimism and dystopian visions of the end of humankind. ‘Dystopian Optimism’ counters globally interconnected precariousness as the condition of our time. It recognizes dystopia as a societal reality and proposes to complement it with optimism: a fiction that enables one to project a different future on oneself or the world. Embedded…

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The Suitcase

Made of brown leather, monogrammed with the initials L.J.M. and dating from the 1930s, the suitcase was found under the bed of Muriel Leyson at the time of her death in Johannesburg in the 1970s. Tightly packed inside were almost a thousand letters spanning a period of ninety years. Muriel Leyson had been a surrogate mother to my father, stepping…

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