‘LUNÄ Talk’ and performance ‘Electrify Everything’ at group exhibition ‘Power Up’, Kunsthalle Mulhouse, FR

Marjolijn Dijkman participates in the group exhibition Power Up, Technical Imaginaries, and Social Utopias at Kunsthalle Mulhouse from 15 February to 4 March 2024. She presents an installation and activation of LUNÄ with a large wall installation of Earthing Discharge (Panorama). On the 25th of March, a LUNÄ Talk will take place, and on the 8th of April, she will perform Electrify Everything together with composer Pom Bouvier b.… Read More

Between the Lines @ Winter sessions

During the Winter sessions, artist Marjolijn Dijkman and electrotechnician Lukas Pol further developed the robotic experiments for the new film and sound installation Between the Lines and the new performance Natura Rebellis. These two productions are part of Marjolijn Dijkman’s artistic research project Between the Lines, which traces the monumental impact of climate change, industrialization, and the First World War in the polluted and traumatized landscapes of the ‘Zone Rouge’ located in the northeast of France.… Read More

Paper by L. Dhaenens published in MODOS Art History Journal

posted in: Uncategorized

Sympathy or strategy? A close look at the Belgian exhibitions of modern and contemporary art organized in Argentina in 1946 and 1948. The paper explores two Belgian art exhibitions that took place in Buenos Aires in 1946 and 1948: the Exposición de arte belga moderno and the Exposición de arte belga contemporáneo. Although these exhibitions appear to be part of the same cultural initiative showcasing Belgian art in Argentina after World War II, a closer examination reveals that they were … Read More

Start WaterLANDS Residency

Marjolijn Dijkman has started her residency as part of the project waterLANDS. The residency focuses on ecological restoration in the context of the largest estuary and surrounding landscape in the North of the Netherlands. EU Horizon has funded the selection of six artists to each reflect on one of six different ecological restoration sites in Europe as part of the large-scale and ambitious project ‘WaterLANDS‘ (2023-2026).… Read More

Dhfm meeting at Meise Botanical Gardens

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.

De-/centering World’s Fairs: Representing Latin American ‘Peripheries’ in Arts and Fashion

posted in: Uncategorized

Laurens Dhaenens participates in the conference De-/Centering World Fairs, organized at Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte, Paris. For the full program see: https://raltac.hypotheses.org/2437. He will present the paper Sympathy or strategy? A close look at the Belgian exhibitions of modern and contemporary art organized in Argentina in 1946 and 1948. As the title specifies, the focus of the paper is on two Belgian art exhibitions that took place in Buenos Aires in 1946 and 1948: the Exposición de arte belga moderno … Read More

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 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

Artistic Research Project at Middelheim Museum / Discussion between Wendy Morris and curator Pieter Boons

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

Hydromedia residency & invitation for a symposium

Alexandra Crouwers is part of the second Hydromedia residency in Utrecht. The project will run in April 2023 hosted by the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp (BE), in October 2023 by HKU in Utrecht (NL) and in April 2024 by HfG Karlsruhe (DE). Hydromedia mobilizes the arts to visualize the Green Deal (area 7) agenda in tangible ways so to promote transnational dissemination and audience engagement. The project is co-funded through the E.U.’s Creative Europe programme.

Symposium: October 5. Register link in post.… Read More

H(a)unted Listening / Radio essay premier at Radiophrenia / September 2nd

H(a)unted Listening is an experimental radio essay about a hunter and a field recordist. A haunted encounter on a misty November morning in a forest in East Germany is the departure for a reflection on (sound)hunting, female forest presence and a strange friendship. The radio essay will premier on September 2nd / 15h30 at the international radiofestival Radiophrenia. Listen on the Radiophrenia stream online or on Resonance Extra.

Listening to Trees / w Bart Backaert at Stadpluraal – Recyclart / September 6th

What stories do the trees in our neighbourhood tell? How do they interact and communicate with each other? When does an ‘invasive’ tree become a ‘native’ tree? What happens when we start listening more to the ecology in our environment? Together with sound artist and researcher Nele Möller and plant expert Bart Backaert, we listen to the stories and sounds of trees in Molenbeek and talk about biodiversity, reforestation and climate distress in the city. 18:30 Meet-Up 19:00 Listening Walk … Read More

(Un)recording the Field / Presentation at the ‘Time to Listen’ Conference

On 19th and 20th August 2023, inm/field notes and the Academy of Arts welcomed participants to the conference »Time to Listen – Sustainability in Contemporary Music«.  Musicians, artists and researchers were invited to reflect on the relationship between sound and ecology. The sessions included presentations, open discussions, workshops, listening sessions and lectures. From more than 40 submissions, the sessions were selected together with an expert jury consisting of Marina Cyrino, Katharina Rosenberger and Fabien Levy. In ‘(Un)recording the Field’  we … Read More

! 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 it needs you to join in! With this mail we are making a call to friends, acquaintances and anyone interested, to become … Read More

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 from microphone to microphone, following the wave of intensified sound that loops the earth every 24 hours at first light. … Read More

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 an analogy for midwives, birth and labour, travelling and displacement, rebirth and resurrection, with deep connections to disempowered voices throughout … Read More

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 Nama that appear in the text of the Fieldguide. Participants of the reading/gathering in Paulshoek were Cornelius Brand, Willem Brand, … Read More

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 living and non-living beings we share our space with. For each show, we pay attention to the work of guests … Read More

Does sex matter? Women artists and gender diversity in museums and the art world.
Study day March 8, 2023 at the Yper Museum

posted in: Uncategorized

Laurens Dhaenens was invited to participate in a study day on gender diversity and museum collections. A brief report of the talks and discussions can be found on the FARO website here. The program: 10.30 Openingsperformance Hind Eljadid  10.30 De geschiedenis van tentoonstellingen over vrouwelijke kunstenaars | Vraaggesprek met Marjan Sterckx (UGent) en Tom Verschaffel (KU Leuven)  11.15 Praktijkgetuigenis: tentoonstellingen maken over vrouwelijke kunstenaars. Panelgesprek: Hannelore Franck (Yper Museum), Chiel Vandenberghe (CC De Steiger), Marjan Sterckx (UGent) en Virginie Devillez … Read More

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 of place, with bark beetles and bitter roots, we explore the collaborative possibilities of ambulatory libraries, storytelling-as-method, and ecologies of … Read More

Un-Conference Media & Culture

posted in: Uncategorized

Laurens Dhaenens presented his research project Beyond the Canon: A Digital Art Historical Approach to the International Circuit of Belgian Modern Art Exhibitions in the First Half of the Twentieth Century at the UN-Conference DigiSoc Work Group Culture & Media (22/09/2022). The program can be found here.

Conference / The Listening Academy

posted in: Conference, Research

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). “This edition of The Listening Academy aims to bring together participating scholars, researchers and artists, to share knowledge, practices, and … Read More

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 and the Democratic Republic of Congo. By revising the methods of architectural history and shifting the focus from questions of … Read More

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 7-10 (2024) will follow the journey through Angola to the port of Luanda. Fieldguides for a Preternaturalist is designed to bring … Read More

The Return

posted in: Fieldguides

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

Gather, a Rehearsal

posted in: Fieldguides, Reading

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

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 information or to RSVP  info@departmentofultimology.com

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 body on the verge of being. As the attack increases, the voice, too, slowly starts to fail. By capturing this … Read More

Transatlantic modernisms. Belgium – Argentina 1910-1958

posted in: Uncategorized

Laurens Dhaenens co-curated the exhibition Belgium-Argentina. Transatlantic Modernisms 1910-1958 together with Adriaan Gonnissen, Emma Driesprong and Juan Cruz Andrada. The exhibition focusses on the artistic connections between Belgium and Argentina in the first half of the 20th century when numerous exchanges took place, driven by migration and travel. The exhibition zooms in on four figures who, each in their own way, connected the art scenes and whose lives and works intersected: Belgian artist Victor Delhez (1902–1985), Argentine art critic and … Read More

Alvim Corrêa – Ninguém teria acreditado

posted in: Uncategorized

Laurens Dhaenens curated together with Fernanda Pitta the exhibition No One Would Have Ever Believed: Alvim Correa and 10 Contemporary Artists at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo (04/12/2021-11/04/2022). The exhibition can be virtually visited here. The exhibition showed a new work by Wendy Morris who made in collaboration with composer Mariske Broeckmeyer the audio installation, A Hysterie of Guiné Weed and Sorrow Seed. Other artists include Alex Cerveny, Hair, Denilson Baniwa, Fernando Gutiérrez Huanchaco, Guerreiro do Divino Amor, Ilê Sartuzi, … Read More

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 to Corrêa’s dark and fantastic visions and to expand the discussion to aspects that transverse history such as colonialism, war, … Read More

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 narrative prose fiction offered rich possibilities for aesthetic innovation. What unites all the primary authors in this volume is a … Read More

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 RTÉ Radio One, and encompassing examples in the form such as the work of George the Poet, Allie Martin and … Read More

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 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

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

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 Broeckmeyer, Joeri Verbesselt and Wendy Morris were able to meet at the large and welcoming table of Netwerk Aalst. The … Read More

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 justice and repair. What does it mean to pursue multispecies justice and repair and how can knowledge which is created … Read More

The seeds of Wild Carrot / contraceptive

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

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 the box seems to rest lightly on the land. From across the river it seems to blend darkly into a … Read More

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 theme of Recognition. The workshop was moderated by Rolf Hughes and Rachel Armstrong (Faculty of Architecture, KU Leuven). I wrote … Read More

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 in a failing body. This exposition reflects upon the relevancy of Migraine Music as an aesthetic phenomenon and by focusing … Read More

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 practised in its diversity rather than to define or determine. As such, the focus on language within artistic research is … Read More

Publication / Forum+

posted in: Anecdotal Evidence

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

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. No one would have believed is an exhibition that brings art, popular culture and politics together. It focusses on the work … Read More

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 met dezelfde fascinatie voor het griezelige, in eenu itvoering die de muziek van Von Bingen herinterpreteert door middel van vrije … Read More

Conference / Ethnographic Returns

posted in: Uncategorized

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

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 of Wendy Morris, Nothing of Importance Occurred: Recuperating a Herball for a 17th century Enslaved Angolan Midwife at the Cape. 

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 Virtues as part of my larger research project Nothing of Importance Occurred. In the garden, with the help of Bart … Read More

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) ??? ????? ??????? ?? ??????????????? ?????????, ??? ??? ??? ???? ??, ????? Een donderpreek. Zo herinner ik mij Jeroen Olyslaegers’ voordracht van de eerste fragmenten uit zijn … Read More

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.… Read More

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 archives of ex-lovers, friends, her publisher’s, in a Carmelite Friary near London. Here in the Olin Library I find a … Read More

The Suitcase

posted in: visual poetry

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