Untelling No. 3
Single-channel microscopic video of plants bearing traces of the seventeenth-century witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, these films containing also the vibrations of my body, my turning hand, my son’s kicks and writhings while I nurse him, voices and footsteps and thunder; three-channel audio of birdsong, my son, his bell — then later: the crickets and bats and one calling frog — and a spoken poem. Glass (hot-casted by artists Ashley Harris and Rowan Raskin); steel; iPad.
The poem, Untelling No. 3, belongs to a larger collection of poems made with words found inside surviving documents* from the Salem witch trials — these words found and then disordered. A spell, a tumbling spell. The words are tumbled and so is their power. These untellings are meant to be spoken aloud.
Heartfelt thanks to Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies Benjamin Ray and the Scholars’ Lab at The University of Virginia for developing and publishing online: The Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project.
11 minutes, 50 seconds
Massachusetts, May 2022
. . .
* No trace of a single session of the [Salem] witchcraft court survives. We have accounts of the trials but no records; we are left with preparatory papers — depositions, indictments, confessions, petitions — and two death warrants. The Salem village record book has been expunged. No newspaper yet circulated in a North American colony. While the bewitched commanded a rapt audience for much of a year, their voices are lost to us. Their words come to us exclusively from men who were far from thorough, seldom impartial, and not always transcribing in the room in which they heard those statements…Salem comes down to us pockmarked by seventeenth century deletions and studded with nineteenth-century inventions.
— Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692