{"product_id":"fieldguides-for-a-preternaturalist-2027volumes","title":"Fieldguides for a Preternaturalist","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eFieldguides for a Preternaturalist \u003c\/em\u003eis 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. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eFieldguides for a Preternaturalist\u003c\/em\u003e are part of the ongoing enquiry \u003cem\u003eNothing of Importance Occurred: Recuperating a Herball for a Seventeenth-Century Enslaved Angolan Midwife at the Cape\u003c\/em\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe narrators of the \u003cem\u003eFieldguides\u003c\/em\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eK. Verlag partners with Morris on the creation of this series of nine booklets. \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/kverlag.com\/products\/fieldguides-for-a-preternaturalist\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\"\u003eLaunched in 2022 with three volumes\u003c\/a\u003e, \u003cem\u003eFieldguides\u003c\/em\u003e comprised writings by the “Company” and by \u003cem\u003eguides\u003c\/em\u003e Nadia Kamies, Rachel O’Donnell, and Joshua Cohen and Johanna Lot. The \u003cem\u003eguides\u003c\/em\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 2027, K. Verlag and Wendy Morris release volumes 4 and 5. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eVolume 4, \u003cem\u003eTell me, tell me, if you know,\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e 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 \u003cem\u003elack of enthusiasm\u003c\/em\u003e for attending mass, for a \u003cem\u003efrivolous remark\u003c\/em\u003e 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 \u003cem\u003eOne Thousand and One Nights\u003c\/em\u003e, that bought \u003cem\u003eher\u003c\/em\u003e time and stayed \u003cem\u003eher\u003c\/em\u003e execution, Beatrice kept talking.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eVolume 5, \u003cem\u003eBitter Sea Wind Sing,\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e 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. \u003cem\u003eBitter Sea Wind Sing\u003c\/em\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eWendy Morris\u003c\/strong\u003e 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 \u003cem\u003eNothing of Importance Occurred\u003c\/em\u003e. \u003cem\u003eRecuperating a Herball for a Seventeenth-Century Enslaved Angolan Midwife at the Cape\u003c\/em\u003e forms the framework. Wendy is expertise director of the network Art \u0026amp; Society at LUCA School of Arts, assistant professor at the University of Leuven, and founding member of the research group \u003cem\u003edeep histories fragile memories\u003c\/em\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\"\u003eListen to \u003cstrong\u003eWendy Morris’s \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.luca-arts.be\/en\/enact-festival-performing-research#transmit_-_radio_works\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\"\u003e\u003cspan class=\"s1\"\u003e\u003ci\u003eWhat Trixie Could Not Tell the Inquisitor\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e,\u003c\/strong\u003e a radio work created in relation to the forthcoming \u003cspan class=\"s1\"\u003e\u003ci\u003eFieldguide 4\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e, on LUCA School of Arts Brussels’ TRANSMIT platform.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"K. Verlag","offers":[{"title":"Set of both volumes","offer_id":64493097746809,"sku":null,"price":23.54,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true},{"title":"Volume 4","offer_id":64493097779577,"sku":null,"price":11.77,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true},{"title":"Volume 5","offer_id":64493156958585,"sku":"SOF-WE-1E-FIE-1E-2027","price":11.77,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0683\/1751\/1935\/files\/260907_K._WM_FG4_5_MockUp_L.jpg?v=1788789806","url":"https:\/\/kverlag.com\/products\/fieldguides-for-a-preternaturalist-2027volumes","provider":"K. Verlag","version":"1.0","type":"link"}