Status: Proposal

Proposal for Hospitalfield Autumn Residency

Overview

A proposal exploring departure as an act of agency rather than temptation or moral failure. Developed as part of the Hospitalfield Autumn Residency application.

Eve did not fall; she departed. Rather than understanding Eve’s “fall” as temptation or moral failure, I approach it as an act of refusal: a conscious decision to leave the image, role, and structure assigned to her. I am interested in the moment a woman exits the frame constructed for her, and in what begins to form immediately afterwards. The archive starts speaking in her place.

This project explores how female departure becomes reconstructed through moral narratives, rumours, institutional records, fragmented family memory, and archival traces left behind after disappearance. I am drawn to what I think of as “archives of absence”: runaway wife notices, narratives of “fallen women,” migration records, erased figures, gaps in family archives, unnamed subjects, and stories built around women whose own voices have been suppressed or rewritten.