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 features the essay of Nadia Kamies "Unpick, Restitch: Doilies, Medorahs and Labouring Plants".
In this essay from the chapbook series "Fieldguides for a Preternaturalist", author and researcher Nadia Kamies narrates an archive-of-the-ordinary that includes hand-crocheted doilies, intricately embroidered medorahs, and a plant held for generations within a family, as material objects and entities through which to rethink the threads that bind us.
Fieldguides for a Preternaturalist is a series of chapbooks designed to bring collaborators, audience and readers together within the project Nothing of Importance Occurred: Recuperating a Herball for a 17th Century Enslaved Angolan Midwife at the Cape. It is an artistic project of recuperation of missing narratives at the Cape through investigation of plants-as-archive and story-telling-as-method. Initiated by South African-Bel- gian artist, Wendy Morris, the project focuses on retrieving a library of plant medicinal knowledge that might have informed the practice of her enslaved ancestor, Maaij Claesje of Angola, midwife in the Company slave lodge in Cape Town.
The fieldguides are conceived as generators of collaborations, inviting guides from historical, anthropological, experiential, ethnobotanical, literary and other disciplines to beam light onto the investigation that follows streams of contraceptive plant knowledge that flowed to the Cape through the bodies of enslaved women, and knowledge already existing at the Cape.
Event Details:
Date: Saturday, 15 April 2023
Time: 14h00-18h00
Venue: Cape Medical Museum Old City Hospital Complex, Portswood Road, Green Point
RSVP: info@nadiakamieswriter.com
Programme:
14h00: Welcome and roundtable introductions of participants and guests
14h30: Outline of the Fieldguides and the Nothing of Importance Project by Wendy Morris
15h30: Invocation by Ugandan/South African poet and storyteller Philippa Namutebi Kabali Kagwa followed by a Polyvocal Reading with Ten Voices led by Nadia Kamies
16h30: Refreshments and informal discussions
Nadia Kamies was born in Cape Town at the foot of Table Mountain, not too far from the confluence of the Black and Liesbeeck Rivers, to Hope Lorraine Kleinsmith of Woodstock and Abdullah Kamies of District Six. Her early years have been shaped by traversing the spaces between the homes of her maternal grandparents in Walmer Estate and her paternal grandmother in District Six. Before she found her way to story-telling, she worked with children as an occupational therapist, an aromatherapist and a yoga teacher. Nadia publishes in Reclamation magazine and Perspectives of a Perennial. Her book, Off-Centre and Out of Focus: Growing up ‘Coloured’ in South Africa, (Fourthwall Books) will appear in 2023.
Wendy Morris was born in Namibia, grew up in South Africa, and lives in Belgium. She is an artist, researcher and professor at Luca School of Arts, Brussels, and the Faculty of Arts, KU Leuven, and founder of the interdisciplinary deep histories fragile memories research cluster. Her work has a double focus on historical and transdisciplinary research and on the artistic and written forms in which this research manifests itself. Her current artistic practice comprises Travelogues, polyvocal Herbals, Audio-Eeries and Duets, clandestine Radioworks, and the Fieldguides. Wendy is currently Artist-Researcher-in-Residence at Middelheim Mu- seum, Antwerp, and preparing an Unruly Procession of Contraceptive Plants for the Museum for June 2023.
Fieldguides for a Preternaturalist issues 1, 2 & 3 will be on sale. R175/issue or R490/3 issues.
Deep Histories Fragile Memories is a research group at Luca School of Arts, Brussels.
The Fieldguide Gathering and Polyvocal Reading are financed by Luca School of Arts Breakout Fund.
The Cape Town Museum is a project of the Western Cape Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport.