Residence with WAAW, Saint Louis, Senegal, supported by Arts Council England
I’ve been taking a lot of time recently to dig deeper into the history of witchcraft accusations.
By looking at a wider span of time outside the great european witch hunt at earlier social movements and then to the impact of globalisation, I’ve discovered how the roots of capitalism shaped the denigration of the natural body, and choked out mysticism. Due to the capitalist necessity for labour, better yet, unpaid labour, I believe there are some interesting parallels to be found between European women and indigenous populations under colonial oppression. This could be something more convoluted and multifarious than Freud’s allusion to female sexuality as ‘a dark continent’.
So I think it’s time I look at my practice of liminal rituals and uncanny bodies, and explore these ideas on a background of postcolonisation. I believe it’s important to deepen my understanding of the tangled relationship between women’s role as ‘other’ to the male, and the colonised cultures role as ‘the other’ to ‘civilized’ society. I want to engage with my responsibilities in re-performing ‘primitivization’ as a way of challenging the terms of civilization that marks women as primitive, and question the use of the exotic body in portrayals of witchcraft and other supernatural entities.
The ideal way to address these concerns is to move my practice to a city marked visually and perceptively by postcolonialism, so I submitted an application to reside in Saint Louis, Senegal, at WAAW Centre for the Arts, believing their proven model of support for emerging artists would allow me to tackle my topic in an invigorating environment, and offer access to a supportive network of contacts.
I have had the good fortune of being accepted on their residence program for 2014, and I’m please to announce that Arts Council England will be supporting me through this project.
Soon I will be departing Spain, and travelling to Senegal to investigate the legacy of traditions that manifested due to colonisation, and how they have been adopted and appropriated in modern Saint Louis. Continuing to investigate supernatural entities as incarnations of a phobia of ‘otherness’, I will focus on narratives of a preternatural nature, learning from these modern adaptations new ways to express these ideas within my practice.
Needless to say, this is the most challenging project I have taken on, but dang I’m excited to get going.
