Women Minor Speculations

• Artist: Nicole Hewitt
• Designer: Tabea Nixdorff
• Publisher: Studio Pangolin
• Year: 2023

Hewitt has recently completed the project Women Minor Speculations through a psychedelic exploration of the Neolithic figurines of South Eastern Europe, from Croatia via the Danube to the Black Sea. The project weaves a tentative narrative between official and imagined personal histories/futures, questioning the processes of visibility and invisibility in in the archive, the translation and transfer of collective perceptions, and the inscription or non-inscription into collective memory of the content and messages of images, discourses and museums. Taking as its starting point the Neolithic figurines found along the Danube region from eastern Croatia to the Danube Delta and the Black Sea through Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria and Greece the project is part road trip, part time travel, part speculative fiction using fragments of time, archaeological fragments, visual fragments, sound fragments and imaginary audio files trying to weave a potential whole from many distinct parts. While the project is a speculation on historicity and futurity it is also a document of the present ‘transitional’ reality of south eastern Europe.

Over a five year period Hewitt and her team collected materials in film, images, sounds, and text dealing with remains as evidential material, with landscapes as witnesses, with interwoven biographies of archaeologists, their objects and subjects of research,  in an exploration of how real and unreal objects of material culture produce interpretations, collisions and hallucinations of public remembering,  using technologies of memory, data storage devices to fracture the  official narrative of history through minor histories, minor narratives and minor fragments. A tentative narrative involves the encounter of two female explorers in south eastern Europe meeting through materials but separated by 6000 years. The project vibrates between object analysis, speculative fiction, material exploration.

The project comprises drawings, texts, objects, video and sound installation, live performances and a feature length film. (2016-2021).

A publication to bring toghether the research materials, poems and visuals will be published December 2023.

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