Fieldguides

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

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. There were leaders of those oxen, groomers of those horses, drivers of those wagons, interpreters and armed infantrymen, free-burghers and … 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