Joshua Cohen

‘Fieldguides for a Preternaturalist’ is a series of small chapbooks designed to bring collaborators, audiences, and readers together as part of the project ‘Nothing of Importance Occurred: Recuperating a Herball for a 17th-Century Enslaved Angolan Midwife at the Cape’, initiated by South African artist Wendy Morris. Through speculative investigations of plants-as-archive and storytelling-as-method, the project focuses on retrieving a library of botanical-medicinal knowledge that perhaps informed Morris’s enslaved ancestor. The ‘Fieldguides’ invite collaborators to shed light on this from multiple angles. Joshua Cohen and Johanna Lot are the guest contributors of the third edition.