Christmas dinner snippets from the dearest @supermarkt.restobar
Roasted and escabeche partridges, slithers of cured mackerel and red-flecked clementine, steaming pheasant and mushroom broths, crumbling local cheeses, and hefty wedges of Mrs Jack's 150 years old Christmas puddings with shovels of brandy butter and beautiful Côtes-du-Rhône vin. Two lovely evenings with friends and family: feasting, sharing, grafting.
Late Autumn in the valleys and limesone folds of the Ardennes. Low light and burning leaves; beach, oak and hazel; strips and acres tied together by deep holloways trod in by meandering trains of cattle.
People have settled here on this narrow strip of limestone for 5000 years, amongst small fields that I doubt have changed much today. A thin wash of Christianity applied to its landmarks and crossroads feels half-hearted in this bronze age tapestry of hedges and pasture. Over the 8 kilometers between Oppagne and Ozo nests a megalithic complex of standing stones, compass points in exact alignment with the summer and autumn solstice. These sites comprised as an astrological cathedral were central to a society who lived by the seasons; who came together in ritual and collective worship at its moments of transience. Cows moved to lower pasture as the leaves turned and the pinpoint shadows of the menhirs aligned in Autumn. The burning leaves and globs of mistletoe were iridescent in the piercing low light and firewood stacks fortified against the freezing fog rolling up the valley and taking seat for winter - all pleasures experienced and felt this week. Back to the evergreen city today.
12/17 Riso Salon. Folklore and Critical Research.
Shrieking Pits by Miles Worner
Shrieking Pits is a graphic research on the phenomenon of folkloric sites and their dynamic with modern industrial-agricultural landscape. Strange watery pits punctuate the fields of Norfolk, an agricultural county of England with a rich folkloric landscape. As place markers, the ‘Shrieking Pits’ are pools of diverse and ancient lore. For the farming people of this glacial runoff landscape, ancient man-made structures and geographic obscurities have played a role in forming the folkloric topology of the region. By the 18th century, agricultural space had gradually been enclosed and industrialised. Almost all ancient barrows and other neolithic landmarks were lost to the plough. However, the Shrieking Pits remained. Today, GPS guided tractors displace their courses around these folkloric pits, tracing the presence of mermaids.
The entanglement of Shrieking Pits within the industrialisation of rural space has allowed its folklore to endure and develop within an evolving reality created by the globalisation of Cartesian industrial-agricultural space. The Shrieking Pits provide a link to a much older landscape; to a community and place-specific history in folklore that may help to conserve the county’s unique identity in the rapidly globalising rural paradigm.
Size and paper: A4 EOS 120gr
Colors: Black
Miles Worner (@milesworner.bits ) is an artist and researcher based in Eindhoven with an interest in the storied and obscure traces of preindustrial aspects of his European cultures - folkloric and sensory ways of knowing; the entanglement of non-human entities and human ventures.
'Shrieking Pits - Aerial Images from Agricultural Norfolk' was published as part of @riso.onomatopee Riso Salon with some other nice works.
Strange watery pits punctuate the fields of Norfolk, an agricultural county of England with a rich folkloric landscape. As place markers, water sources and sites of treachery, the ‘Shrieking Pits’ are pools of diverse and ancient lore; home to Celtic nature gods, heartbroken women, wailing Vikings, Roman altars, ghostly carriages and horsemen, and deadly Mermaids. Some are relics of millennia-old geographic anomalies in shifting gravel banks and played a part in the neolithic pastoral landscape. Others are much younger: pits dug to extract marl fertiliser in the 1730s agricultural boom, mediaeval flint and ore mines. These pits, archaic in their own right, lacked the history of the glacial Shrieking Pits but naturally became associated with the Shrieking Pit legends, proliferating its lore in the county.
For the farming people of this glacial runoff landscape with few striking natural features, ancient man made structures and geographic obscurities have always played a role in forming the folkloric topology of the region. By the 18th century however, agricultural space had gradually been enclosed and industrialised by pioneering estates. Almost all ancient barrows and other neolithic landmarks have since been lost to the plough. The Shrieking Pits remained however, interloping industrial-agricultural space, their treacherous pits being hostile to the sacred plough as to the ‘dear boys’ who were dragged to their ‘darkness and death’. Today, GPS guided tractors displace their courses around the Shrieking Pits, tracing the presence of mermaids in the digital cloud.
The entanglement of Shrieking Pits within the industrialisation of rural space has allowed its folklore to endure and develop within an evolving reality facing new issues created by the globalisation of Cartesian industrial-agricultural space. The Shrieking Pits provide a link to a much older landscape; to a community and place-specific history in folklore that may help to conserve the county’s unique identity in a rapidly globalising rural paradigm."
During recovery from my broken leg this year, my curiosity has pooled in Norfolk's 'shrieking pits'. The strange watery holes embedded in this agricultural landscape have amassed a rich tapestry of tales and folklore over the centuries, housing murderous mermaid spirits, and marking out intersections in the ritual landscape. While most other folkloric and ancient sites have been lost to the plough, these pits have remained - traced out by GPS guided tractors into industrial agricultural space.
Chi vo far ‘na bona zena
i magn’un erb’ d’tut la mena
“Who wants to eat a good supper
should eat a weed of every kind"
Blankets of Dandelions cover the alpine meadows and orchards of val di Blenio in the very first sun of April. Cleaned and soaked in a constructed tumbling pool of a nearby melt water river, and cooked traditionally with rice and a little salt.
Dandelions and other Chicory family are a somewhat forgotten part of our diet, their bitter compounds an ancient nourishment for the liver and a source of fortitude for manual work.
Liminal Log: August/October 2023. An exhibition of prints made by exposing beetroot juice to light. The prints will fade with time, and exposure to light, leaving behind their annotation of contents, place, time.
Warham Bronze Age Hill Fort ditch, September 2023. Despite the ambiguity surrounding its initial function, the ditches of Warham contain a definite abundance of chalk land ecology. Between the rock-roses and squincyworts, chalkhill blues flitter around the modern day drewid, filling his foraging baskets. Occasionally, the resident moles turn up artifacts from the sites 3000 year history, like these saxon wax seals.
