WITCH HUNT
CAUTION: this ongoing article contains
mentions of abuse
I) Allez mon voisin à la crèche
Two
months after getting
chickenpox, 11 years old Jason Wilsher-Mills – the youngest of eight
children from a working-class family in Wakefield, UK - was still ill and weak.
In June 1980, his worrying mother was told by the family GP she was
being hysterical...
Eventually, her son was admitted to hospital. On 1 August 1980,
the day Siouxsie and The Banshees
released both their Kaleidoscope
album and Red Light single, at 2.54PM while watching TV opposite his hospital bed the
athlete 254 Sebastian
Coe won a Gold Medal in Moscow... Jason’s parents learned their
son’s diagnostic: he will be lucky to live up to his 16th birthday. 254 played magic number, as De
La Soul put it, despite the now 56 years
old artist being wheelchair bound ever since.
45 years later, women inhabiting Earth in Western countries are less frequently called hysterical but psychotic or other psychiatric terms are so ravaging our planet, it causes a wild climate catastrophe between the happy few in power and the high number of living beings suffering degradation!
If
patriarchy was all the rage from the cradle of Jesus until he walked on a salty red sea, its ripple effect has
persisted in many forms: sexism and misogyny are the most enduring terms in
place nowadays gangrening the globe.
Once
Gutenberg invented the first major
print works in the mid XV Century, early
Modern Europe went on flame about witches via journalists on broadsheets, art
works, books in Latin. By late XV Century, a
Catholic clergyman wrote The Hammer of
Witches aka Malleus Maleficarum proposing
straight forwardly the extermination of women then referred to as witches for
their supposedly pact with the devil. Within 300 years, from pre-print in
post-medieval period to the Industrial / French Revolution, around 45000 people
were exterminated as they were thought to practice magic / witchcraft and have a so-called
evil pact: 80% were women. 80 PER CENT. Executions were by
burning or hanging, except in England where they were mainly drowned on ducking
stools. No wonder Brexit occurred eventually! Caroline Woodley, Kingess of Hackney is entertaining herself with
its residents! Meanwhile, across lands and oceans Indonesian Kamasan painting was strictly practiced by men. They sexualised
women, reduced them to a reproduction purpose solely or cast them as evil. Until 25 April 2025, Citra
Sasmita’s Into Eternal Land reclaims an ancestral tradition, while also
challenging a colonial narrative, that honours the history of female herbalists
where they are depicting as powerful women inhabiting a post patriarchal world at The Barbican, London.
%20Jo%20Underhill%20and%20Barbican%20(7).jpg)
Citra Sasmita Into Eternal Land Installation view 2025
(c) Jo Underhill and Barbican
Back in Medieval Europe, witch trials stopped due to lack of scientific evidence as proofs were based on oral testimony and superstition. Also, intellectuals in the Enlightenment era took their distance from popular belief. According to French political scientist Armelle Le Bras Chopard (from 19·43 in French), the law stepped in and women were put into a captive mode. In France, the 1804 Code Civil limited the autonomy of women establishing that she was under the guardianship of a man, her husband for example, and treated as a minor. But “From the early XIII Century until 1870, English Common law held that most of the property that a wife had owned as a feme sole came under the control of the husband at the time of the marriage”. The Married Women's Property Act passed in 1870... Ironically, a century later, a single woman in the 1970’s Britain still needed a male guarantor for a loan or credit card; in 1975, 10 years after France, women gained the right to open a bank account in their own name... yet they had been voting since 1918, 26 years before their Bleu Blanc Rouge neighbours. It’s been so back and forth for European women that we, as a collective, need to have some thoughts to the ones suffering a disease called male toxicity: so much power transitioning over the centuries, it might have been hard work to adapt!
How
cynical women were the epicentre of a – still ongoing – genocide for holding on
to their belief in herbal concoctions and were proof-free executed some 500
years ago when today men are spared condemnation over rape because, caricaturally,
their sperm vanishes!
A
century after Germany gave birth to letters on paper that helped spread a
European genocide on women, the empowered men of the Tudor era of England went
after homosexuals: sodomy between men was a capital offense under the Buggery Act
of 1533
– a law which remained in some form in England and Wales until 1967. Across the pond, in New York and around USA where
homosexuality was also a criminal act, 36 years old gay photographer Peter Hujar shot / designed a poster for the Gay Liberation Front in 1970, a
movement led by his boyfriend Jim
Fouratt. Between Stonewall and Aids, a brand new world was shaking up the
planet through Reggae to Punk to Sinead
O’Connor. 11 months after being diagnosed with AIDS, Hujar died in November 1987 in the
same Medical Centre room, number 1423, where he had photographed transgender
actress Candy Darling, best known
as Warhol Superstar, while she was
dying 14 years earlier. 1423, a magic number flying high on the wild side. Over
100 photographs in fine prints depicting the queer scene of New York, portraits
of known (Susan Sontag, William S Burroughs, Fran Lebowitz) and
unknowns, animals in farms etc as well as some short films of Peter Hujar by Andy Warhol are displayed in Eyes
Open in the Dark at Raven Row until 6 April 2025.
,%201974%20peter%20hujar.jpg)
John Flowers (Backstage, Palm Casino Review),
1974 © Peter Hujar
[UPDATE: until 8 March 2025,
Alice Neel in the Queer World exhibits a
photograph of Candy Darling,
upstairs the wooden staircase at Victoria
Miro Gallery]
The
burning question here is what were women doing in Tudor era when not being exterminated?
Staying
under Henry VIII, privileged women
painted, did art but most of their work vanished like sperm because they were deemed
as immature amateurs. However, some Flemish women Susanna Horenbout and Levina
Teerlinc, who moved to England, were admired by its King and Albrecht Dürer would purchase their
work. Despite being difficult to trace their art ownership, they were part of
400 years of female artists in Britain up to 1920 in 2024 in
Now You See Us exhibition at
Tate Britain. Had they known
they would be exhibited centuries later, would they have thought of it as a
science fiction act?
[Highly recommended: Wiener Holocaust Library and Gallery https://wienerholocaustlibrary.org/exhibitions/
Fred Kormis: Sculpting
the Twentieth Century until 6 February 2025. If unable
to make it, Kormis’ sculptures
are viewable in Gladstone Park, north-west London]
II) Yes I’m a Witch
Because
of the brutal “professional manual for witch hunters” Malleus Maleficarum (1486) and De Lamiis et Pythonicis Mulieribus (1489), a sufficiently high number of re-prints up until 1669 helped the propagation and proliferation of women
hatred / ongoing mental and physical degradation. These “avant-garde”
trailblazers for Mein Kampf were
largely known by the White male population in power whether lawyers,
intellectuals, Catholics or artists. But the earliest known image of witches on brooms, from Martin Le Franc’s Champion
des dames Vaudoises poem, dates back to 1451.
From mid XV Century to the official end of Witch
Hunting, a myriad of male artists indulged on their darkest imaginations, thus
participating through visual culture to the witch obsession: Albrecht
Dürer,
Hans
Mielich, Agostino
Veneziano,
Melchior
Küsel, Hans
Baldung Grien,
Jacques
de Ghein, Salvator
Rosa,
Claude
Gillot,
Francesco
Maria Guazzo and so many others.
Despite being involved in XVI Century
humanist circles in Strasbourg, a town at times in Germany at times in East of
France but definitely the official seat of the European Parliament in XXI Century, Hans
Baldung Grien and Albrecht Dürer took to the imagery of witches for pleasure dome. Shaping
women as wicked creatures jeopardising their family nest allowed them to pursue
irrationality in a pre-nascent rational burgeoning Enlightment context of the
next century. Francisco de Goya y Lucientes might have been more
concerned in women’s fate as he seemed to be questioning what were the Woke of
that era doing in his 1799 Si amanece; nos vamos’s etching. However
defying Catholic psyche as well as being critical over Spanish Inquisition
(persecution of female herbalists, Jewish or Muslim people), his numerous
paintings on witches with a medieval soupçon still triggered horror rather than
appeasement!
In Medieval Women: In Their Own Words at British Library until 2 March 2025, women testimonies spoke of the power of the female body, and the skill of female medical practitioners in a society in which healthcare provision was generally informal and domestic. Through a combination of the nature world, ancient Greek and Roman medicine, the influence of ingredients from the Arabic world and herbal recipes from Muslim women’s beauty routines – a large population living in sorority side-by-side with Christians and Jewish in southern Italy at the time – women exchanged tips and passed them on in between them as mentioned on BBC4 from 44.37.
The opening from De Ornatu Mulierum (On Women’s Cosmetics)
© British
Library Board
The
medical sector was dominated by university-trained male physicians, yet women
performed many different medical functions, as healers, midwives and even
surgeons. The quiet blockbuster exhibition shows further the power of women,
however erased it has been so far and is still being unearthed, in politics,
art, religion or even writing with audacity and candid eroticism odes to the
vagina as well as music composing.
Gwerful
Mechain Poem to the Vagina
© British
Library Board
When Madonna
reclaimed Disco dance floor via Hung Up from John Travolta in Staying Alive, some five centuries
earlier the Catholic’s fever was setting the Old Europe ablaze, she visually replaced
women as a point of reference showing off her / their ability to flirt around
in the unsafe dark streets. The Church was at war against women practicing the
dark art while the male-dominated art world provided a visual impact on the
population: in lieu of a mass within god-fearing societies, naked women would
gather around Satan to celebrate the beast. These art scenes would portray the
inversion of god via a priest being worshipped by his fully dressed obedient followers.
Women were perceived and depicted in art with dual visions:
vulnerable, therefore more prone to be tempted and lured by an evil monster but
also powerful due to their knowledge of herbs and nature for cooking and
healing purposes; ugly and unfertile old crones would factually indicate
malevolence versus young and beautiful temptresses leading pious men to their dooms.
Five centuries later, film director Coralie
Fargeat would give spinal birth to the phenomenal The Substance: a beautiful menopaused Demi Moore would switch, thanks to a magical potion’s injection, to
a young beautiful sexually active inner self leading herself eventually to a
decaying old hag. Defying old age is what our global societies have been expecting
of women since early XX Century! We have now
become our own slaughterers. In her acceptance Golden Globe speech as Best Female Actor for her role, the North
American actress revealed that in her 45 years career it was the first time she
ever won an award... the Law of Universe stepped in to ward off any captivity
curse... Moore’s testimony was sadly
echoing 65 years old French actress Annie
Girardot in 1996 for her Best Supporting Actress award at the César cérémonie! Though she won a César for Best Actress in 1977, her film career faded drastically from the following
decade. The pressing question here is what did these actresses do or say right for
them to be discarded from the misogynistic film industry family nest?
Apart from Switzerland (that gave women the right to vote in 1971), European countries had decriminalised witchcraft by 1750. By the XIX Century, female
artists reclaimed their visions of magical women, slightly humanising them not
only via traditional art forms but through a nascent medium, photography. From
a long history of horror, witches switched to fairy tales for children or even became
a direct link to the dead at séance sessions like Victoria Woodhull did, who happened to be also the first woman
running for USA president in 1872. In 1985, photographer Cindy
Sherman, in her Fairy Tales
series, selfied herself with huge prosthetic chin and nose covered with warts. Exaggerating
the concept of visual witches allowed her to toy around with stereotypes and
artificiality... distorting somehow the truth. Could /can an ugly and old woman
/have/ possibly be.en malicious? Can the female body indicate how a woman
thinks?
Until 23 February 2025, The
Photographer’s Gallery celebrates the work of
Italian female photojournalist Letizia Battaglia: Life, Love
and Death in Sicily. She stated she wanted to express herself in a (toxic) masculine
society where women were expected to be silent and well behaved. She regretted,
in an interview shown in the exhibition, how she sometimes had to shout at men
to get respected; she hated shouting and hated having to behave like a man! To
her, photography was a mean to tell a tale though within a violence system,
photography doesn’t change anything.
Letizia Battaglia
La bambina con il pallone. Palermo,
quartiere La Cala, 1980
Until the 6 February 2025,
Bolivian born Paris based Kenia Alamaraz
Murillo explored her lineage of weaving through Andean tradition, Catholic
legacy from colonialism and slavery in Andean
Cosmovision at
Waddington Custot in London. From Andean mythologies to
urban found objects, she pieces together her fragmented memory of her Indigenous
identity while stitching her energy onto the fibre spirit displaying a
kaleidoscopic perspective woven into her rich ser y estar self.
Los Urus, 2024
woven threads, Bolivian carnival costume embroidery
and LED
lights on stainless steel frame
If textile belongs to the banality of our everyday life, yet The Devil Wears Prada
proves otherwise, it has been a recurrent artistic (and protest) force since
the 60’s all over the world. The use of fibre, cotton, wool, crochet, knitting
and so on has been overlooked and undervalued in Western societies as it was a
woman’s occupation. Upon the Pinochet
military coup in Chile in 1973, Cecilia Vicuña started to create quipus
– knots in Quechua language that are a memory device – as a mark of socialism
and “magically,
they help the liberation struggle”. Following the (mainly) Spanish
colonisation in Latin America and enforcing Christianity on the Inca in the XV Century, quipus, like witches, were burned!
Feminist and Marxist Silvia
Federici has studied how the Witch Hunt phenomenon was a catalyst to
annihilate women inner power in Western societies that forced them into being
financially captive in a capitalist and pre-colonial contexts. “Capitalism
was born from the separation of people from the land and its first task was to
make work independent of the seasons and to lengthen the workday beyond the
limits of our endurance”. If women were accused of flying or speaking
with animals to inhabit their powers, as in the impressive Laura Baumeister’s La hija de
todas las rabias, Federici
believes these powers were not imaginary because women were in constant contact
with nature for medicinal and spiritual knowledge.
III) Hold Up
In Jennifer Binnie’s
Forest Visions, at Richard Saltoun until 1 March 2025, the artist merges myth, ritual in the cycle of
nature as if becoming or being an ‘invisible’ magical woman... in
forests where unseen energies break down hierarchies between the human and
non-human. Animals are guides helping transformation, knowledge and reclaim
power from the wild within the ecological web.
At night, enslaved people
in Louisiana would secretly go to the forest to perform rituals of their magical
ancestors, often of Yoruba descent, perpetuating a legacy of their then faraway
lands due to deportation / forced immigration. Today, pollutants classified as acute toxics
and environmental hazards pervade the air above the majority
Black communities in the US Deep South State: a toxic legacy has taken over a
reconstructed magical legacy. All along the Mississippi river, preserved for
tourism purpose, lie slave owners luxurious mansions while their ‘savages’, as
they used to call them among other offences, and dehumanised people cemeteries
are lost in hostile landscape. At times, these makeshifts cemeteries are found
when industry breaks grounds over the footprints of what was once upon a time
plantations of sugar cane – sugar already generated cash flow when French
Jesuit priests first introduced the cane in New Orleans in 1751.
These industries, producing the most toxic air in the USA and highest risks of
cancer, are implanted over death camps lying along a corridor known as Death Alley. Air
quality equals to a perennial climate of racism. Usually, memorials are built
over a site / or left intact and empty when Human Rights have been sabotaged!
Here each plantation has at least one cemetery; they are over 500 plantations
across Death Alley! Under Louisiana Law, cemeteries have perpetual protected
status but if not located (purposely) or not well researched, industrial
companies settle on their site.
Within half a century of the Salem Witch trials in Massachusetts and within indigenous territory
space, Christian colonists prefigured their genocidal dispossession: their
lands became plantations where slaves would overwork in designed death camps
for capitalism purpose: maximise productivity and profit. Around Mabon (Autumn Equinox), enslaved people would work between 18 to 20 hours
daily to harvest sugar cane before the arrival of frost. Erased cemeteries are
the results of persistent racist imaginary: they are unworthy of preservations
as well as being regarded as threats to industrial development. This represents
centuries of dehumanisation, degradation, humiliation. Human and ecological
reparations are at stake as seen presently at Wellcome Collection until 27 April 2025.
In the cinematic masterpiece Nickel
Boys
directed by RaMell Ross in 2024, based on Colson Whitehead’s North American
historical drama novel, the film retraces through candid and poetical furtive
moments the brutal and racial reality of 1960’s Florida. The
purposely disorientating gaze as a continuous point of view induces seasickness
at first, but it eventually vanishes to leave place to a much more nauseating
statement. Also located in the South of the United States as in Louisiana, the
State was home to a real reform school from 1900 to 2011
called Florida School for Boys: a juvenile detention institution where three
times as many black as white students died and were buried in high number of
unmarked graves. “Despite periodic investigations, changes of leadership, and
promises to improve, the allegations of cruelty and abuse continued” until a
forensic anthropology survey was granted allowing Erin Kimmerle of the University of South Florida in 2012 to investigate independently. “In 2008, in response to allegations of the
extreme beatings and torture that took place there, state officials sealed the
building in a public ceremony, leaving a memorial plaque. It has remained empty
since.” Upon years of investigation, 27 suspected graves were identified by
ground-penetrating radar in 2019; in 2024, Florida agreed to provide compensation to victims and
possibly their descendants.
In
that same corridor of horror, Sugarcane’s documentary - on the disappearance of magical children
and women abused by Catholic priests who forced the Indigenous to abandon their
faith in nature - is a 2024 shocking account
where ground-penetrating radar was also used to uncover bodies. Resonating both
film and documentary is Phillip Noyce’
Rabbit-Proof Fence, a 2002 Australian film
depicting Aboriginal children taken away from their magical families,
depriving them from their contact with nature, forcing them into a Catholic
monotheistic faith.
From all corners of Earth
and for centuries, magical beings have been submitted to the White man’s
fantasy of eradicating their multiple faiths, possessing their territories, displacing
them while depriving them from their spiritual artefacts... in the name of god
and capitalism, they erased their memories! What if nature and stolen precious objects
stagnating in dormant museums are calling ancestors’ children to visit them... who
sadly perish at seas or at best live in sordid conditions! Brunei Gallery SOAS: Stories of
migration until 22 March 2025 uncovers
“The story of migration never truly ends.
There are always new voices to amplify, new challenges to highlight and new
solutions to seek.”
Born
in Saigon following the end of the Vietnam War, Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn had a Buddhist upbringing in USA where he
immigrated in 1979 aged three. His films weave the
power of memory and lack of historical memory, an exploration of remembering
and remembrance as a form of resistance and healing.
In
both his short films Above the Sea,
Against the Sky and When Water
Embraces Empty Space exhibited at
Showroom
until 5 April 2025, a lament soundscape waves
through the room. Will the Luf boat from Papua New Guinea in Oceania remember
its way home? Will it help restore lost songs, lost language, lost rituals that
were taken away with it around 1882.The boat serves
as a bridge between past and future, the makers and the keepers, the dominant
narrative of German colonialism and the erased stories of the Luf people. Can
the boat heal past collective trauma and restore the memory of its
construction?
Injustice, unfairness, shame intertwine our emotions: we are
connected to ourselves when faced with stories from afar. Can we really project
pain of the other when our own pain lies from another horizon? The 72 minutes
documented film The Encounter shows
with no artifice the reconnection of three of boat builders’ magical descendants
from the island of Luf. They encounter their vessel for the first time in a 2024 trip to Berlin Humboldt Forum. The
whole experience reveals a true empathy in the way they approach and touch shyly
for real a tale they heard of when children.
Mati Diop’s Dahomey offers a philosophical and
poetical hymn to restitution where a statue talks
in their own (lost?) language, longing to be back in their land expressing some
form of anxiety about changes of landscape and culture. So many looted objects
from the colonial era are waiting impatiently in Western Countries dark
corridors for a wake-up call: will the children of colonised magical ancestors
reconnect with their belief in plants, animals, nature, objects?
In his assertion “We don’t inherit the land from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children” Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn evokes his Buddhist Indigenous cosmovision that gives a soul to all existing creatures including mountains.
IV) Too
Sick to Pray
In
1856, a century away from the official end of Witch Hunt and 22 years into the Slavery Abolition Act in Britain, the
Great Trigonometric Survey established that Peak XV Mountain (named by the White European male population) was
the highest in the world. Peak XV
would later be named Mount Everest.
In
a rush for competition to reach and own each corner of Earth, the British
Empire was both at lost and at a loose end when failing to be the first to
access the North Pole in 1909 and the South
Pole in 1911. In desperate need to restore their credibility
on exploring the planet’s extremities, they ambitioned the “Third Pole” soon
after the horror of trenches ended with WWI.
To the magical Indigenous population, the Himalayan
Mountain has been known locally as Sagarmatha
or Chomolangma ‘Mother Goddess of the World’: she was a highly spiritual place that was not meant to be climbed;
Tibetan language didn’t even have a word for “summit”! We are half a century
away from the White male conquerors preparing their ascension to the Moon and all her phases worshiped by
witches and other magical beings...
In
1919, the Royal
Geography Society (RGS) and Alpine Club jointly set up the Mount Everest Committee. 100 years
later, RGS re-examines a behind the
scenes story through film, photography and other documents related to the
expeditions in 1921, 1922 and 1924 in an attempt to reveal enduring damages done to a Buddhist
population. The 2022-3 re-run Everest
Through the Lens exhibition takes place until 15 April 2025. A tragic narrative unrolls right before our
eyes filled with twinkle little stars: power, racial and geopolitical dynamics
are at serious play...
The
viewer is welcomed by a question: “Should
we Climb?”
Through
the lens of an Army Officer’s film and photography, Mount Everest and its surrounding is magnificent, elegantly dressed
in pure white ‘fur’, ecologically serene and of breath-taking beauty. But it
soon appears that the imperial ambition to reach the highest summit of Earth switched to a marketing adventure:
the image maker Army officer deposited £8000 towards the expeditions, allowing
him to retain the rights to all photographic and film documentation.
By
sensationalising Tibetan culture and spicing up ethno-anthropology with
entertainment, he expected a decent return on his investment. Identical to the
medieval times with the witch obsession images which helped the propagation and
proliferation of women hatred, the image maker Army officer’s moving images provided
a Western population with a distorted vision on far away ways of living.
Promoting his venture for pure publicity stunt, he had a troupe of seven Tibetan
dancers advertising them as lamas (Buddhist teachers) when the majority were
novice monks. His work talked of fantastic dances, clothing made from human
skin, people being hacked to pieces in death rituals. Though the White male
climbers might not have reached the peak, the expeditions were portrayed as
glorious trekkings and enhanced with patriotic fervour; though the two White
male climbers died near the peak – on their way up or down – their deaths were
seen as heroic men making sacrifice to the imperial cause; national mourning at
St Paul Cathedral was attended by Queen Elisabeth II’s grandfather King
George V. Further fuelling the Western population’s imagination with an ingrained
gothic image, the final stunt went “If
you had lived, as they had lived and died in the heart of nature, would you,
yourself, wish for any better grave than a grave of pure white snow?”
Meanwhile,
the local population received a condescending treatment all along. They were
termed as unwashed, strange and weird; Sherpa and Bhotiya porters who made the
film possible were nicknamed ‘tigers’
as well as being described as ‘children
in [White male climbers] care’ or
‘coolies’ if on low pay. A magical population
who performed ‘devil dances’...
A
base camp was set up as a busy temporary village to prepare for the big climb:
a handful of White male British climbers, around 150 Tibetan and Nepalese
expedition members whose names were mostly not even recorded and horses,
donkeys, yaks! The White male climbers ran the camp according to colonialist
attitude: social, racial and class hierarchies were in place.
When
one the main male climber decided to go ahead with climbing on a particular
treacherous weather condition in 1922, seven
high-altitude porters died in an avalanche: six Sherpa men – Thankay, Sangay,
Temba, Lhakpa, Pasang Namgya, Pema and one Bhotiya man – Norbu. Their death was
edited out of the film, erased from public record and handled bureaucratically
and procedurally. Their families were ‘compensated’...
On
13 Sept 2013, London based journalists
received a BFI’s invite to a press
screening as The Epic of Everest was
part of the BFI
National Archive Restoration undertaken in collaboration with Sandra Noel, the image maker Army
officer’s daughter. The press release celebrated the exploits of the climbers
and film director in dithyrambic circumvolutions: “Filming
in brutally harsh conditions”; “... few
images in cinema are as epic – or moving – as the final shots of a blood red
sunset over the Himalayas”; the film director “was a heroic, pioneering explorer”; “The film is also among the earliest filmed records of life in Tibet and
features sequences at Phari Dzong (Pagri), Shekar Dzong (Xegar) and Rongbuk
monastery”.
After
seeing the exhibition on 14 February 2025,
this specific press release’s excerpt is of excruciating discomfort: “But what resonates so deeply is [film
director]’s ability to frame the
vulnerability, isolation and courage of people persevering...”
Having
participated to this masquerade 12 years ago out of ignorance, I contacted RGS’s press office 18 February 2025:
“... Would it be possible to know what
motivated RGS to show the behind the scenes? 10 years ago I was invited by the BFI
when they restored the film and I don't remember any notice of the behind the
scene.”
[Communication officer had no idea what I meant by ‘behind the scenes’;
patronised me about the exhibition “Everest
through the lens... explores the roles of a range of people from India, Nepal
and Tibet who supported the European expeditions to Everest in the 1920s,
including high altitude porters, translators, photographic assistants etc.”;
she assumed I didn’t see the exhibition and invited me to see it online: https://www.rgs.org/our-collections/stories-from-our-collections/online-exhibitions/everest-through-the-lens
I emailed a
board screening I took indicating RGS‘s
own words "The exhibition goes
behind the scenes..." asking: I)
"Would it be possible to know what
motivated RGS to show the behind the scenes?" II) “Were these behind the
scenes shown before at RGS? III) Was the BFI aware of Noel "treatment
of Tibetan culture remains especially unnerving; the condescension of Noel’s
narration smacks not only of cultural insensitivity..."?
This time,
she decided to be condescending: I misunderstood “behind the scenes”; she then explained the exhibition assuming I
didn’t understand it “... [Film Director] was
telling a very specific story as he wanted/needed to sell tickets.”; she
managed to respond to my second question but slightly misled about its date
“... yes,
it was first on display in 2022 and this is a rerun” adding “There is no great reveal in the exhibition,
and it is not an attempt to catch anyone out. The exhibition is a way of the [RGS]
telling a much richer story than the simple one often told... But
again, it has been understood widely in the academic community for many years”
– How stupid of me for not belonging to the Elite! Is incompetent press woman
aware that in April 2024 academic Jamie Owen of RGS said disgracefully to the academic The Guardian’s journalist “It is
a remarkable story... It represents human struggle against the elements; it
means teamwork; working with and understanding other cultures, and it means
showing respect for the mountain and the environment, which, I am afraid to
say, we have sorely lost touch with today.” (How
about a similar narrative: Academic film maker drugged and raped 13 years old Samantha
G in 1977 but he did so with great respect)
Regarding
the BFI, RGS’s fraudulent press woman had no idea if they knew anything and
suggested I checked with their film curator – I would have assumed the BFI to be quite academic - Then she
suggested I checked “Dr Jan Faull, who previously worked as a film
curator at the BFI”... who also worked for RGS]
Back
in 2013,
Jan Faull introduced
The Epic of Everest at BFI fully aware of the nasty
narrative surrounding the film but chose, for
marketing purpose, to tone it down!
Still
wondering what motivated RGS to
exhibit unseen documents they had in their archive, I turned my research on Sandra Noel, who was involved in her
father’s film restoration for the BFI.
If she had died, I thought it might be easier to reveal to the general public abuse
towards a magical population. She passed away in February 2018
as Kent
Online revealed in August 2018!
Another
factor that might ‘force’ RGS to
reveal the expeditions’ behind the scenes archive is how influential such films
play in tourism, creating human traffic jam on far away high altitude soils! Everest faces the challenge of rising
temperature
and more climbers – “Since 1953,
Everest’s summit has been reached more than 11,000 times by more than 6,000
people” – The waste produced by tourists pollutes these sacred lands! “The
highest-ever recorded sample of microplastics was found on the “Balcony” of Mt.
Everest at 8,440 m, one of the last resting spots before reaching the summit.
This microplastic is likely coming from the clothing and equipment worn by
climbers”
The
pristine environment on Earth
highest peaks have darkened from white to black: in the past 30 years, the Mother
Goddess of the World has lost 2000 years of ice... in the name of capitalism!
When
the Frères Lumière introduced their
motion picture cameras in the last years of XIX Century, image makers went
around the globe to produce a blend of ethno-anthropological-entertaining
films. Not yet called documentaries, the silent era showed the first world the
extreme worlds. Not yet called Cinéma
vérité, a term coined in the late 50’s early 60’s by Jean Rouch, North American film maker shot Nanook of the North in the Canadian Arctic, living for a year and
half with an Inuit magical population. An international commercial success in 1922, the film was a foundation for many film makers to come
in that era.
Eventually criticised for producing fake news on the Inuit life and forging a legacy in popular culture of sordid fascination for human zoos, film maker defended his work stating: "One often has to distort a thing in order to catch its true spirit"
To be continued
VF!X?C) Patriarchy reclaimed by women in Hackney
DECEMBER 2024
17 December 2024: Jennifer Wynter (assistant director of benefits and homeless prevention at Hackney Council). [UPDATE: see 29 January 2025]
and
recognises
her hard work to fight the homelessness crisis, crying over spit milk “These numbers can feel despairing, and this
year’s awards ceremony was a poignant display of the emotion felt by those of
us working in the sector”... Mid July 2024, she
didn’t seem to care
much about those dying in her care! Caroline
Woodley, Labour Mayor of Hackney,
couldn’t bother showing concern over those dying in her borough either. Yet she
did share her ‘emotions’ on X / Twitter:
6 December 2023 “The
victim who died following yesterday’s tragic shooting in Vine Close has
been named as Lianne Gordon. @MayorofHackney: "My thoughts and everyone’s
at the Council are with the loved ones of Lianne and the other injured
victims." ℹ️
https://orlo.uk/feavG”; 26 December 2023
“My thoughts go
out to the family and loved ones of those affected by this tragic loss of life.
Thank you to the emergency services for their support on the scene. We will do
all we can to help the police with their enquiries and support those impacted
by this terrible event. https://x.com/MPSHackney/sta/MPSHackney/status/1739606802973544669”; 28 April 2024
“Solidarity with #Hackney unions for
#InternationalWorkersMemorialDay We met at the London Fields memorial bench for
public
servants who lost their lives to Covid-19, to honour them and to commit to
“Remember the dead. Fight for the living.” #IWMD24”; 30 May 2024
“Response from @mayorofhackney Caroline Woodley
to last night's shooting in Dalston.
Anyone with information that can help police should call 101 or post @MetCC
reference CAD 8082/29May. To remain anonymous, call Crimestoppers on 0800 555
111.”; 24 July 2024 “This is terrible news. It is so desperately sad
and wrong that a young boy’s life has been taken. I hope we can come
together to support his family, friends and communities. If anyone has any
information about the incident, please do call 101 quoting CAD 5387/23Jul.”;
24 July 2024 “'This incident took place in a busy area and in broad daylight. There
must be people who'd be able to tell us more about what happened' Mayor of
Hackney, @carowoodley
urges anyone with information to come forward after a fatal stabbing in Hackney
last night.”; 1 August 2024 “A man has
tragically died following a stabbing on Northwold Road, near Stoke
Newington Common, on Tuesday 30 July. @MayorofHackney: "My thoughts are
with his family and friends during this incredibly difficult time. https://orlo.uk/RHCci
”; 3 August 2024 “The terrible
events in Southport and devastating loss of three young girls, is made even
more distressing by those spreading misinformation and targeting Mosques.
Forever thankful to the communities who are honouring the victims and standing
together against hate. #HopeNotHate”; 4 September 2024 “Finally, the #Grenfell report has been
released. Seven years after that tragic
injustice, the grief and anger remains. We've heard it in the voices of the
survivors and the bereaved and felt it on the silent walks. Commitment to
reform is vital. 💚”; 14 October 2024: “I’m so sorry to
hear about the sudden loss of Nick Perry. Sincere condolences, love and
strength to his husband Andrew, and to family and friends hit by such
incredibly sad news. Please read this warm and insightful tribute, by fellow
local history powerhouse Amir Dotan.”; 10 November 2024: “It was an honour to join the parade and to remember
those who have fallen. “At the going down of the sun and in the morning /
We will remember them.” – Binyon #LestWeForget”
23 December 2024:
Around 5PM, I received three calls from 0204 532 13
13. Being deaf, I didn’t pick up but I intensely stressed because it was
insisting. At 5.12PM, I received a text informing me
I had a voicemail. My voicemail goes “Please don’t leave a message, I’m deaf!”Not having credits on my phone + being deaf, I have no idea
what’s up!
24 December 2024: I checked the number at the library: https://who-called.co.uk/Number/02045321313: it might be from Hackney Council though their number is usually 0208 356 xx xx – [On 2 January 2025, I received a letter from Jennifer Wynter “...Full Case review has been determined on 23 December 2024... Wynter knows I’m deaf!]
JANUARY 2025
2
January 2025:
Letter sent 23 December 2024 from Jennifer Wynter – Homeless prevention
officer at Hackney Council, backed
up by Caroline Woodley, Mayor of Hackney - her usual confusion
& vagueness:
3 January 2025, email from rogue landlord:
4 January 2025: On my way to my local library, Lea Bridge ward Cllr Margaret Gordon was 'waiting for me' by the library though her surgery was due elsewhere (+ she doesn’t live near the library!). The other Lea Bridge surgery was advertised on 2 January for 11 January: “Lea Bridge ward Labour councillors next surgery (advice session) is on Saturday January 11 from 1.30pm to 2.30pm, Venetia's Coffee Shop, 55 Chatsworth Rd E5 0LH. * Appointment in advance is preferred - call 07890654068 or email leabridge@hackney-labour.org @hackneycouncil”
Once back home:
Letter from rogue landlord
Week starting 6 January 2025, I received various post cards from state agents on a daily basis. In the past 10 years, I might have received three or four a year of these types of postcards:
8 January 2025: Letter sent 2 January 2025 from Jennifer Wynter – Homeless prevention officer at Hackney Council, backed up by Caroline Woodley, Mayor of Hackney - her usual confusion & vagueness:
9 January 2025: I owe £600:
11 January 2025: Around 8AM, while having breakfast by my window looking over Lea River, a woman by the Walthamstow Marches right across my window got her phone out by - 5°C aiming in my direction. I middled fingered her, she rushed away. A minute later, she was back walking towards Lea Valley Park Bridge, crossed it. Minutes later, she was below my window... stopping to take picture.s of the canal boats...
UPDATE: Though posted on 16 January 2025 by Julie Zaugg on her Instagram,
it looks like she was across my window as temperature on 16 January were 6°C:
it was not as frosty as the image is! Liked by Arnaud
De La Grange, London correspondent for Le
Figaro.
Around
Mid day, I published my first words of Witch
Hunt from 2 January to 9 January.
I
went back home.
4.18PM, Caroline Woodley, Labour Mayor
of Hackney posted she was in my hood: “Starting
off the New Year with @HackneyLabour, talking to #Lea Bridge residents on one
of those stunning cold, crisp and sunny January days 🌹❤️”
I
guess Caroline Woodley was middle
fingering me for criticising Margaret
Gordon on an email dated 8 November 2024 “‘Complex’ is a word I have seen written so
many times (from my ward Cllr in
September 2023) in one year that I associate it with ‘we can’t do anything’!
Yet, does my ward
Cllr work hard… if only my Lea Bridge neighbours knew who she is or
where/when to go to meet their Cllr!”:
9.41PM: my Labour ward Councillor Margaret Gordon and co posted “Starting the year in Lea Bridge ward, @HackneyLabour team have been listening to residents on the doorstep about their issues: cost of living crisis, rising rents, tackling climate emergency. Contact Lea Bridge cllrs: leabridge@hackney-labour.org.uk @hackneycouncil @Margaretgord”
15
January 2025:
Debt Collector for EDF sent email +
letter: I owe over £500. I have not received any letters from EDF for over six months... Has corrupt
postman not delivered my mail? My mail has been regularly opened and left
opened...
17
January 2025:
Hackney Centre sent a letter dated 13 January 2025: My Job Seeker Allowance (JSA) will be £92 a week from April 2025 [Yet I haven’t signed on since early December 2024; I haven’t applied to Universal Credit; Jennifer
Wynter has sent me many letters informing my allowance have stopped...]
18
January 2025:
Hackney Centre sent a letter dated 14 January 2025: My JSA
stopped on 2 January 2025 [Yet, Jennifer Wynter sent me a letter dated 23 December 2024
– received 2 January 2025 – informing me my JSA stopped 18 November 2024
as published above]
20
January 2025:
landlord sent email about rent arrears and Section 8 - eviction notice; He
urges me to speak to him. No thanks, I’m tired of his lies, the misleading from
Hackney. I’m resting...
21 January 2025: Landlord sent letter from his email. How funny he is so prompt when he let me rot in his flat for eight years with no bath, no shower... accusing me in court of all sorts of psychiatric illnesses! A court case he lost in September 2023! Anyway, I received his letter around 3pm when all letters are through my letter box around 5 or 6 pm...
Caroline Woodley needs foster carers for
Hackney: “Message
from Hackney's Labour Mayor: Foster carers play a vital part in the lives of
children who come into care, & we always need new people. If you have space
in your home and your life, find out more about how we can support you to
become a foster carer https://hackney.gov.uk/fostering?utm_campaign=1913739_Hackney%20News&utm_medium=dotdigital&utm_source=emailmarketing&dm_i=6NIJ,150NF,29Y9DU,5AFO1,1”
Why can’t she ask me if I want to foster in a flat she can offer me in order to escape rogue and dangerous landlord? Because she has labelled me as being psychotic as well as displaying an unpredictable behaviour between January and March 2024! In August 2024, Woodley decided to book without my consent with a psychiatrist Natalie Shoham who specialises in schizophrenia and psychosis on menopaused women “Shoham N (2023). Associations between common mental disorders and menopause” and deaf women! Did Woodley think viciously I would naively throw myself to the rat laboratory I’ve been avoiding for two years and get sectioned?
East London NHS Foundation Trust where Caroline Woodley hoped to get me down has been reviewed in December 2024 as “Abhorrent,
unethical, harmful” for under 18’s! Yet I have been loud about EL NHS FT ever since my GP has been
insisted for two years to get me in... being seen by a
psychiatrist that has no experience on women victims of sexual oppression!
Yet, Caroline Woodley knew I was a
victim of sexual oppression from 2021 which she looked
up again in January 2023:
Why
would a woman send another woman to her death while claiming she supports women
victims of abuse?
Due
to me being alive in November 2024, Caroline Woodley arranged to erase me
from celebrating Xmas / Winter Fest
at Woodberry Community Centre. Sarah Young, Labour Councillor for
Woodberry was quite certainly making sure my presence was not welcome...
[UPDATE - February 2025: Once again, Caroline Woodley is on a piss take
journey... this time at Sadler's Wells
where everybody
is welcome "A great day for
culture! @Sadlers_Wells East is open and that "YOU ARE WELCOME""]
9 November 2024
“Would you, or a local business you know, like a stall at Woodberry Down’s Winterfest?” https://x.com/redmond_centre/status/1855192285748572471
People
I volunteer with in Woodberry CC had
received an email from Zimmie Sutcliffe,
project coordinator but architect IRL. They asked me if I was coming. I told
them he might have erased my name on that occasion; they all witnessed how rude
he was to me because I dared complain about how refugees were treated like
shite in the centre! Sarah Young promised to investigate and despite CCTV...
nothing!
Back
in Spring 2024, when Ramadan was over, people I volunteer with asked me to help them for
the celebration. Three people of WCC
didn’t come: Zimmie Sutcliffe, Finn Keane-Conley and the problematic
& catholic French girl Caroline...
Caroline Woodlley didn’t show up!
After
the dispute I had with Sutcliffe, he
and girlfriend ostracised me; they organised a photography session
with a French guy called
Pierre Bureau: How funny I’m French and a
photographer... but no longer gets invited to anything!
Around
that time in Autumn 2024, they installed a CCTV in
the kitchen without letting me know
Woodley is proud of her one year as Mayor of Hackney: https://x.com/carowoodley/status/1857492588921606638 “It's one year since I took office as
@mayorofhackney The year has gone quickly and there is much more work to do,
but I promise to keep listening, learning and doing my best. Thank you to
everyone who has helped, challenged, campaigned and given their all - you make
#Hackney!” –https://x.com/hackneycouncil/status/1857488456743821425 “"Each and every day I recognise what an
honour it is to serve the people who make Hackney." An update from
@mayorofhackney Caroline Woodley, after one year in the role.”.
Yet, she has misled Hackney residents “But campaigners said other options were not explored and the council's
consultation had "misled the community"… Hackney Council accepted its
consultation materials were "not sufficiently clear"” as well as
being unlawful “You’ve also overseen an *unlawful* consultation on
proposed children’s centres closures - as the cabinet member for Early Years,
will you be taking responsibility for #Hackney council ‘misleading the public’
as was argued by our legal team? https://bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c98ej9rl31qo
@hackneycouncil”. Hackney needs a safe Mayor, not
dictator ego-tripping!
23 January 2025: I think Julie Zaugg was dressed in gothic
attire by the library at 10am! What a disguise from a strict
Catholic good girl!
24 January 2025: I just watched the last surviving persons
from Hitler genocide.
26 January 2025:
29 January 2025: On 28 January, I wrote this bit “17 December 2024: Jennifer Wynter (assistant director of benefits and homeless prevention at Hackney Council) interviews herself...” at around 3PM. At 5.16PM, Wynter sent an email “Our records show that you were due to pay an agreed arrangement payment of £413.54 to your council tax account.” Followed by a text message at 5.26PM. The woman is a total creep backed up by Caroline Woodley, Labour Mayor of Hackney.
30 January 2025 to 8 February 2025: I received an avalanche
of emails and snail mails from electricity / Water debt collectors! Electricity
threatens to come to flat and takes stuff (?); I’ve also received snail mails
from Jennifer Wynter harassing me about
Council Tax she and Caroline Woodley
Mayor of Hackney know I can’t pay! Jennifer Wynter also called me and left a message: my voicemail goes "please don't leave a message I'm deaf" She knows I'm deaf!
FEBRUARY 2025
1 February 2025: I wrote part I above: I) Allez mon voisin à la
crèche that includes “Between Stonewall and Aids, a brand new
world was shaking up the planet through Reggae to Punk to Sinead O’Connor.” JD
Beauvallet, former colleague at Les
Inrocks, has been hunting me ever since I resigned in 1992...
33 years on, he tweets / X on Reggae and Punk “grand
homme!”
about
photographer
Dennis Morris exhibition on Reggae
and Punk... Morris has so many exhibitions between Paris (Agnes B is very link with Les Inrocks that dates back to the
times I worked for them from 1991) and London that
he even forgets to mention some... I think it’s the
first time I see JDB mentioning Morris! Yet Dennis Morris lived in Paris in the 90’s
for eight years where he collaborated with French
music magazine Rock & Folk.
Had he been a photographer for Paris based Les
Inrocks, surely JD Beauvallet
would have included him amongst the eight White male
only photographers he ‘worships’!
3 February 2025: Within half an hour I
received two emails from my GP’s practice and my dental practice. Both of them
have seriously been taking the piss... My GP since May 2022:
I have seen no GP since and I’m menopaused...
Agnieszka
Polej replied to an email I sent on
18 December 2024:
response to an email I sent 20 September 2024
(which I'l come back to it)
December 2024 because as an homeless
I have no rights to free treatments...
I can't change my glasses either, if they break, I can't see!
4 February 2025: Sarah Harvey (friend with Carmen
Gray) emailed on my Yahoo,
over 10 years after arguing with me because I’m just a blog. Funny that once she wanted to know my ID and I told her I didn’t always recognise people,
she
stopped sending invites and JD
Beauvallet emailed me this on 17 Oct
2014, 14:05 jdthedj@pavilion.co.uk: “Mais honnêtement, n'y vois pas de mépris, je ne me
souviens pas - ma mémoire est poreuse et je souffre de prosopagnosie depuis des
années”. JD Beauvallet that searches cultural blogs
where he says he’s after
blogs from 4.14mns – once he found my blog, he contacted PRs and asked who
was behind Babylondonorbital, PRs
indulged... my guess only but how far am I from the reality?
JDB tweeted / Xed
about Dennis Morris as mentioned
in 1 February 2025.
6 February 2025: Jennifer Wynter is working hard for Caroline Woodley...
7 February 2025: Dentist emails about an
appointment that I cancelled in December 2024...
Hours
later, landlord emails some bullshit
I replied I had nothing to say to him + he visited the flat in December 2024.
8 February 2025: I wrote part II above: II) Yes I’m a Witch
11 February 2025 @ 9.39AM: Landlord emails he’s
coming on 12 February... if I don’t open my door, he
will charge me £19 per hour... I replied in BCC to my MP Diane Abbott:
Random
thoughts: how depressing in XXI Century, a US
president fools himself as Jesus.
When a French male député wants to light a religious candle... that Sandrine Rousseau has to interfere in that total nonsense!
Following
writing FEBRUARY 2025 part between 3 and 5 PM
on 11 February 2025, I received a text from Jennifer Wynter @ 5.19PM
and an email about not paying my Council Tax bill!
12 February 2025: Landlord turned up at 11 AM. I was beside myself! He was all soft spoken
telling me he was all here for me, to help me. I told him to leave loudly. He
didn’t. I slammed my door. He freaks me out so badly.
Late
afternoon, postman got half way through letter box electricity debt collector:
they are going to change my meter reading to a Pay As You Go box, meaning I
have no more electricity; I have no gas... Landlord has not paid his court fees
(£30000) on the case he lost against me in September 2023. Once he pays, I get
nearly £2000 (I paid my Legal Aid fees in 2022) as my ward Cllr Margaret Gordon and Mayor of Hackney Caroline Woodley know. But as long as he doesn’t pay, I can die!
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