June 2023: Keynote - ‘Repairing the Rupture: A Collaborative Performance with Elder'
Couch, Amanda (2023) June 2023: Keynote - ‘Repairing the Rupture: A Collaborative Performance with Elder'. In: Articulation / Experience / Embodiment Research Network Research, Eastern ARC institutions in Medical Humanities, 20 June 2023, University of Essex and online. (Unpublished)
![[thumbnail of text-10-FINAL-USED.pdf]](https://research.uca.ac.uk/style/images/fileicons/application_pdf.png "text-10-FINAL-USED.pdf")
Ecological philosopher Timothy Morton in Being Ecological posits that “humans are traumatized by having severed [our] connections with nonhuman beings, connections that exist deep within [our] bodies” (Morton, 2018:32). And it was the enclosure of the commons that instigated such a severing, argues Marxist feminist Silvia Federici in Caliban and the Witch: our peasant ancestors forcibly removed and denied access to land they had relied on for their subsistence resulting in a damaging transformation in the web of relations between humans and the natural world (Federici, 2004). Entangled within this removal, cunning folk, and in particular women were persecuted, tortured, and killed during the witch trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which “underlies the entwined oppressions of race, sex, class, and ecological destruction” claims Neopaganist, Starhawk in Dreaming in the Dark, (Starhawk, 1988:xxvii). The ramifications of such a rupture in relations is also evident in the medical profession, where enclosure of women’s bodies and knowledge led to them being outlawed as healers and herbalists (Federici, 2004 & Ehrenreich and Deirdre, 1973).
By way of the elder bush, Sambucus nigra, for Articulation/Experience/Embodiment, Amanda Couch will facilitate a participatory performance paper, Repairing the Rupture: A Collaborative Performance Paper with Elder which explores these contexts with the aim to unearth, revive and disseminate knowledge lost as a result of this separation from the land and the more-than-human. Couch will weave together practice, theory, autobiography, and examples of her own art and research projects to bridge the divide and build connection, exploring and celebrating wild plants that would have been used as food and medicine.
Together we will become intimate with the elder, imbibing a homemade elderflower reviving cordial. Whilst sharing our memories of kinship with wild plants, foraging, nourishment, and healing, we might absorb the knowledge of the elder as it infuses and flows through our bodies to re-construct and heal our collective cultural inheritance.
For participants who will be attending online, prior to the event, you will be invited to forage for elder flowers and given instructions to make your own homemade elderflower cordial to drink alongside those in the onsite space.
References:
Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English (2010) Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers 2nd edition New York: Feminist Press.
Silvia Federici (2018) Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women Oakland, CA.: PM Press.
Starhawk (1988) Dreaming in the Dark: Magic, Sex and Politics Boston: Beacon Press.
Timothy Morton (2018) Being Ecological London: Pelican Books.
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8344-9668
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