Fieldguides for a Preternaturalist
Fieldguides for a Preternaturalist
Fieldguides for a Preternaturalist is a series of chapbooks and an ambulatory library, small enough to be concealed in an under-pocket, clandestine, to be read while walking, to be read in closed company, to be read at a ruined keep on a hill in the Pyrenees, to be read beside a rock of mourning in Namaqualand, to be read at the kerb of an expropriated street in Cape Town, to be read alongside the Kwanza River in Angola.
Fieldguides for a Preternaturalist are part of the ongoing enquiry Nothing of Importance Occurred: Recuperating a Herball for a Seventeenth-Century Enslaved Angolan Midwife at the Cape initiated by Namibian-South African artist Wendy Morris. It is a project of recuperation of plant medicinal knowledge held by women that recorded histories would have us believe never existed. Working through speculative methods and unconventional archives, the project uncovers stories of women around the world who quietly defied patriarchal oversight, caring for themselves and each other, protecting their bodies and the knowledge that offered them reproductive autonomy.
The narrators of the Fieldguides are “the Company,” a preternatural collective suspended between the mundane and the miraculous. Its members are a constellation of organs and entities: Wandering Womb and EAR; time-travelers and shape-shifters: Orlando, Muriel, and the Scolds; wind and weather-beings: Travelbreath and Gravelbreath; spirit-beings and plants-as-beings.
K. Verlag partners with Morris on the creation of this series of nine booklets. Launched in 2022 with three volumes, Fieldguides comprised writings by the “Company” and by guides Nadia Kamies, Rachel O’Donnell, and Joshua Cohen and Johanna Lot. The guides were invited to write towards the project in a word-of-mouth form and, following publication, each chapbook led to a set of gatherings at which the texts were performed as polyvocal readings.
In 2027, K. Verlag and Wendy Morris release volumes 4 and 5.
Volume 4, Tell me, tell me, if you know, is a circle of stories that wind around the testimony of a fourteenth-century Occitan woman, Béatrice de Planissoles. Charged by the Inquisitorial court for a lack of enthusiasm for attending mass, for a frivolous remark made about the Host, and for accommodating a night-time visit by a sorceress, Béatrice was sentenced to life in prison in 1321. Her voice rings out from a testimony that was prompted and shaped by an Inquisitor and his scribes, but is still striking in its candor. She did not hold back. Like the unraveling tales of Scheherazade in One Thousand and One Nights, that bought her time and stayed her execution, Beatrice kept talking.
Volume 5, Bitter Sea Wind Sing, tells of a gathering in Sharjah on the shores of the Bitter Sea. Plant-cunners, herb-women, midwives, and practitioners congregate. The meeting is clandestine. Bitter Sea Wind Sing winds a cycle of stories around the recorded history of an early twentieth-century South African woman, Louisa Mvemve: healer, diagnostician, midwife, and innovator of cures. Mvemve kept up a defiant correspondence with officialdom that was intent on curbing her practice. She wrote herself into the record. Officialdom legislated her out of practice.
Wendy Morris is an artist, writer, and researcher. Her practice manifests in ephemeral gatherings, travelogues, processions, sonic herballs, radioworks, stitch-epics, and fieldguides. 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 research is focused on anti-fertility plant histories as clandestine female archives. Morris’s work embraces histories of traveling women that connect pockets of contraceptive knowledge from the Pyrenees to Cape Town. Wendy works as the Company, a constellation of organs and entities that has evolved as an artistic-fictive conceit in the investigation into the fragile history of her Angolan ancestor. Forfeiting a sense of wholeness and a single-point perspective, the focus has shifted towards a plurality of parts and beings. The research project Nothing of Importance Occurred. Recuperating a Herball for a Seventeenth-Century Enslaved Angolan Midwife at the Cape forms the framework. Wendy is expertise director of the network Art & Society at LUCA School of Arts, assistant professor at the University of Leuven, and founding member of the research group deep histories fragile memories.
Listen to Wendy Morris’s What Trixie Could Not Tell the Inquisitor, a radio work created in relation to the forthcoming Fieldguide 4, on LUCA School of Arts Brussels’ TRANSMIT platform.
