An ongoing intervention installation at the Salem Village Parsonage historical site. Here plants obscure the words Tituba and slave as well as a possessive apostrophe after the name Parris. The omissions enable an alternative story in which the Reverend Parris himself is to blame.
This work is part of a larger project called Blank Lines Do Not Say Nothing in which I turn my attention to the witch trials of seventeenth-century Salem, Massachusetts — tipping over the facts we have inherited to empower a different way of looking. Evidence is reimagined, not as neutral or unfeeling, but as emotional and deeply subjective — as something shaped and formed by its namer. It seems to me: history is a translation, it is human, it is emotive, it is unreliable and vulnerable to wondering, to questioning, to asking: “if no two people ever hear precisely the same sound” — as the curator and author Lauren van Haaften-Schick writes in What is the Shape and Feel of the In-between? — then what does this mean for this thing we call truth? (And how can I even ask such a thing at a time like this one? But then again: how can I not?) The urgency I have found in the following realization: the logic of the trials does not live in history alone — it exists here and today.
Guided by a liminal kind of looking — looking as an act of curiosity rather than knowing — and moved by the possibility that attention can be an act of care, this inquiry exists at the intersection of moving and still imagery, field recordings, poetry, storytelling, research, and wonder.
Clover and purple aster found growing wild at the site, edible glue.
Massachusetts, October 2022
