FIELDGUIDES FOR A PRETERNATURALIST, 1, Unpick, Restitch, doilies, medorahs & labouring plants

45pp., illus., paperback, Berlin, 2022

"Fieldguides for a Preternaturalist is a series of small chapbooks that bring collaborators, audiences, and readers together within the project Nothing of Importance Occurred: Recuperating a Herball for a 17th Century Enslaved Angolan Midwife at the Cape. Initiated by South African artist Wendy Morris, Nothing of Importance Occurred is an artistic project recuperating missing narratives at the Cape through speculative investigations of plants-as-archive and storytelling-as-method. It has as its focus the retrieving of a library of botanical-medicinal knowledge that might have informed Morris’s enslaved ancestor, Maaij Claesje of Angola, midwife in the Company Slave Lodge in Cape Town. The investigation follows streams of contraceptive plant knowledge that flowed to the Cape through the bodies of enslaved women from Angola, Moçambique, and Madagascar, and from India, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka, as well as through the bodies of women emigrating from the Netherlands, and Huguenots fleeing France. The investigation traces practices already existent at the Cape in the healing ecologies of Khoi, Nama, and San women. Because upwards of four million Angolans were trafficked to the Americas, the project follows recorded practices among women there too. This project of recuperation leads towards a polyvocal Herball of contraceptive plants, the collaborative Fieldguides, and a part-fictionalized Return from Cape Town to the interior of Angola." from inside back cover

"My essay,  UNPICK, RESTITCH Doilies, Medorahs and Labouring Plants, draws on an archive of the ordinary that includes family photographs, hand-crocheted doilies, an intricately embroidered medorah, and a plant held for generations within a family, through which we may rethink the threads that bind us." from Nadia Kamies website

Nadia Kamies was born and raised in Cape Town. She writes for Reclamation magazine and Perspectives of a Perennial.