Something Like #25 – Hag Lore w/ Bitsy, feat. Anchoress, Beth, Elif, & Rochelle

Female ascetics, hermits, wise women, and witches, and the lore that circles around this archetype is what we will be exploring in the 25th episode of Something Like: Hag Lore. I’m very pleased to be sharing this episode with some wonderful friends and artists who share my fascination with this archetype. We’re going to listen to a reading by the Canadian artist Rochelle Goldberg, a reading from Don Quixote by the Canadian Berlin-based artist Elif Saydam, sound recordings by the British Berlin-based artist and music from the Berlin based artist and musician Anchoress (Anna-Lucia Nissen & Alex Rathborne). And so we’re going to also look at female-identifying characters who chose a life of seclusion, who removed themselves from the material world: the Desert Mothers, the anchoresses of medieval christianity, and perhaps even some contemporary evolutions of this type. We’ll delve into what is behind the fascination with the notion of female recluses.

• As always, Something Like’s intro jingle comes courtesy of my main bud Roger 3000
• Big thanks to Anna-Lucia Nissen, Beth Collar, Elif Saydam, and Rochelle Goldberg for their invaluable contributions to this episode!
• Check out Chris Newby’s 1993 film Anchoress here.
• Learn more about Rochelle Goldberg’s Born in a Beam of Light here.
• A useful resource in relation to the themes picked up in this episode is of course, The Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation, by Silvia Federici.