For a first meeting of this semester, and to welcome Marjolijn Dijkman into the research group, we met at the Botanical Gardens at Meise. In the glasshouse: Alexandra Crouwers, Laurens Dhaenens, Wendy Morris, Nico Boons, Renée Turner and Marjolijn Dijkman. At the table: Renée, Marjolijn, Nico, Hannah Van Hove, Wendy and Laurens. Photo by Alexandra. We missed Nele Möller who was sick.
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 person on Maaij Claesje, an enslaved woman in the VOC (Dutch East India Company) slave lodge, Cape Town, who was, eventually, able to negotiate her emancipation … Read More
In residence at Middelheim Museum, Wendy Morris is exploring how knowledge of plant-based contraception has been passed down clandestinely for centuries. Curator Pieter Boons spoke with the artist about the many themes in her work: about our lost relationship with plants, about contraception, loss of language and personal connections to histories of enslavement. P: But you don’t work alone. You are working in or as a Company. Who is the Company? First of all the name of the ‘Company’ refers … Read More
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 it needs you to join in! With this mail we are making a call to friends, acquaintances and anyone interested, to become … Read More
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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Middelheim Museum / Reading the Landscape
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
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 of place, with bark beetles and bitter roots, we explore the collaborative possibilities of ambulatory libraries, storytelling-as-method, and ecologies of … Read More
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 and the Democratic Republic of Congo. By revising the methods of architectural history and shifting the focus from questions of … Read More
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
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
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 information or to RSVP info@departmentofultimology.com
A Hysterie of Guiné Weed and Sorrow Seed, a duet across the Atlantic. Audio installation, cloths of The Company Ghosts, Song Sheet. Exhibition Ninguém teria acreditado, Pinacoteca, Sao Paulo. 04/12/21-04/03/22. Read more
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 to Corrêa’s dark and fantastic visions and to expand the discussion to aspects that transverse history such as colonialism, war, … Read More
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 RTÉ Radio One, and encompassing examples in the form such as the work of George the Poet, Allie Martin and … Read More
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.
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 a Preternaturalist are word-of-mouth essays, published as small chapbooks, to be read at gatherings of collaborators and audiences brought together … Read More
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 Müller, Wendy Morris and Netwerk Aalst: Pieternel Vermoortel and Piet Mertens. Interview Hart Magazine: Pieternel Vermoortel: The bodies are an … Read More
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 Broeckmeyer, Joeri Verbesselt and Wendy Morris were able to meet at the large and welcoming table of Netwerk Aalst. The … Read More
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 justice and repair. What does it mean to pursue multispecies justice and repair and how can knowledge which is created … Read More
Small packages of wild carrot seed (Daucus carota) were included in one of the letters of the Lost Volumes. Each package contains one teaspoon of wild carrot seed, the amount a woman would need to chew as a ‘morning after’ contraceptive. There are numerous historical references to wild carrot seed as an anti-fertility agent. In works in the Hippocratic Corpus, Pliny the Elder, Dioscorides, Scibonius Largus, and Constantine the African, wild carrot seed is described as an abortifacient, emmenagogue or … Read More
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 the box seems to rest lightly on the land. From across the river it seems to blend darkly into a … Read More
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 practised in its diversity rather than to define or determine. As such, the focus on language within artistic research is … Read More
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 bij deze bedenkingen betreft de invloed van de onderzoekservaring zelf op ideeën over taal als methodologisch instrument, wetenschappelijke argumentatie en … Read More
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. No one would have believed is an exhibition that brings art, popular culture and politics together. It focusses on the work … Read More
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 met dezelfde fascinatie voor het griezelige, in eenu itvoering die de muziek van Von Bingen herinterpreteert door middel van vrije … Read More
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 of the project can be viewed here
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 of Wendy Morris, Nothing of Importance Occurred: Recuperating a Herball for a 17th century Enslaved Angolan Midwife at the Cape.
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 Virtues as part of my larger research project Nothing of Importance Occurred. In the garden, with the help of Bart … Read More
Mariske Broeckmeyer preparing her audio work for Travelogue of the Wandering Womb. Alias exhibition. Netwerk Aalst.
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 in to care for him at vulnerable moments in his life. As she and her two sisters became frail in … Read More