Maleficium / Sycorax

There are memories that are not articulated through language but carried within the body.

They do not inscribe themselves in texts, but in posture and reaction—in what is passed on silently between generations. My body, too, knows things I have never lived through. It remembers flight and loss, the fine line between adaptation and resistance. Perhaps this memory originates with my grandmother—my Vieja Bruja—who moved through her life with determination and contradiction.

Today, I photograph with her old analog camera: a small time machine made of metal and glass. When I look through it, I do not see only the present; I see traces, fractures, superimpositions; something that exists yet resists visibility. In the darkroom, these images slowly emerge from nothingness: silhouettes, light and shadow, past and present. Photography here does not function as representation, but as a mode of inquiry—perhaps even of invocation: a form of remembrance magic.
From these images, a book takes shape. A book that does not merely document, but interrogates. It weaves my personal history together with feminist theory and an awareness of historical violence, persecution, resistance, and the disciplining of female bodies. The camera becomes an instrument of investigation and disclosure; the book a site where image and text, present and past, the intimate and the political, femininity and strength intertwine.

I do not tell a linear story. What matters are fragments, traces, the persistence of what has never entirely disappeared. The witches of history—those who were excluded, condemned, burned—appear here not as distant figures, but as part of a collective memory that extends into my own family and consciousness.
And perhaps, upon opening the book, one encounters an intuition: that what was labeled as weakness was often resistance; that what was defined as deviation was another way of seeing the world. And that something of it—quiet, tenacious, unwavering—continues to burn.

It is both resonance and beginning: a space in which the witches of history and the present, the Vieja Bruja of my family, and my own very personal witches meet.

Maleficium / Sycorax

Tessa Krieger, Masterthesis 2025 at Technical University of Applied Sciences Mannheim
Supervised by: Dr. Deborah Enzmann, Prof. Dr. Thomas Friedrich
Typefaces used: Caslon by Scott Vander Zee, Avara by Velvetyne Type Foundry, Falling Script by Masahiro Naruse
Paper: Munken Print Cream 1.5 — FSC® 90 g/m², Gmund Colors Matt 06, 12, 25 & 27 — 100 g/m²
Printing and Binding: Self-printed and hand-bound

© Tessa Krieger, 2025