a revision and reclamation of historical wrongs enacted against othered women during the witch trials of 16thC England
Thoughts on re-membering the past as a way to inhabit the present
In a recent podcast for the Serpentine, I was particularly struck by a conversation with Samson Kambalu when talking about myth and history, this passage in particular ...
Samson Kambalu: ‘I don't know. History is the prerogative of the historian and the say it's always written by winners and I'm an advocate of a more accommodating approach to history. Almost something perhaps closer to myth. I think perhaps even myth is more truthful than history. History is the powerful, trying to interpret an otherwise complex reality to their needs. Myth allows you, everybody, to come in and contribute their own meaning’.
In choosing to look back into history, employing forgotten and esoteric methodologies that would have been deployed in the 16thC and earlier, this is not merely a naive longing for a fictonal past, rather an examination of where we went wrong, a consideration of how we can break the trajectory, extract other forgotten historys and world build in the present within the inbetween spaces left by these unwritten gaps in history.
It is not enough to continue to point out and highlight the wrongs being wrought, we have to build a new loom, a framework within which we can weave a new tapestry