As a Thread Winding Backwards, an Audio Eerie + Prologue + A Tale of Eleven Births + The Ghosts of my Friends 

Wendy Morris & Mariske Broeckmeyer / 2020 / Exhibition ‘No One Would Have Believed’ / Netwerk Aalst

An audio-eerie in two parts: First, a dissolving into a constellation of organs and entities, human plant spirit machine. Then, an invocation of an absent ancestor and the beginning of a journey north towards a place once called home. From Signal Hill to the Kanariberg, from Uilenberg to the Kamiesberg. Return, retrace, repair, refrain. The company will keep to the high ground, will travel with the winds.

Maaij Claesje of Angola, ancestor to the artist, enslaved as a child by the Portuguese and then by the Dutch VOC, arrived in the Cape in 1658. She was able to negotiate her freedom in 1689 after serving at sea on the passage to Batavia as midwife to a pregnant Dutch woman. Maaij Claesje lived out the rest of her life as ‘free’ midwife in the Slave Lodge. She died in 1731, in her eighties. Her death was described in the VOC Company journal thus: “Dec 31st, calm, settled weather. Nothing of importance occurred. An old slave woman, Maaij Claesje, died in the Slave Lodge”.

The audio-eerie includes the voices of Mariske Broeckmeyer, Wendy Morris, Michele Burgers, Imelda Coetzee and Jamaica Kincaid; the borrowed vocabularies of Yvette Christianse, Saidiya Hartman, Olive Schreiner, Jamaica Kincaid and Frederique Aït-Touati; and the borrowed plant knowledges of kruiedokters and midwives of Namaqualand: Anna ‘Wiet’ Brand, Anna ‘Boom’ Styewe, Elsie Kardinal, Gertruida ‘Trooi’ Klaase and Jan ‘Brood’ van der Westhuizen.

Works that make up Travelogue of the Wandering Womb. Her Fantastic Encounters and Curious Utterings: To the Copper Mountains are: Prologue, on headphones, 4 min + As a Thread Winding Backwards, an Audio Eerie, quadraphonic sound, 18min. + A Tale of Eleven Births, pin and thread genealogies + The Ghosts of my Friends, cloth.