Les Petroleuses at Bishopshouse Friday 30 January 2026
15thc Bishopshouse conceals centuries old ritualistic graffiti, anti-witchcraft scratchings, ‘marian marks’ and ‘daisy wheels’, all aimed at warding off ‘evil spirits’ (usually women) reminding us of the many women persecuted for their ‘sorcery’ through the ages.
Amongst other things, in their performance Les Petroleuses deploys the paraphernalia of domesticity to speak back against gendered conformities. Tonight, we holler up for heretics through the mangled erasure and appropriation of signs, symbols and sounds, including a re-incantation of an enigmatic 14thc poem about a woman surviving on the moors on primroses and violets. Condemned as a magic ‘spell’ of secular ‘dangerous’ sensual enchantment, its power lies not only in its ambivalent status as a sacred or profane text, but in its ambiguity.
Join us in incendiarising conventions let’s kindle the flames!
Gill and Lyn
After the performance, Gill created a 5 mins video – Les Petroleuses at Bishopshouse – made up from a couple of clips of the performance at Bishopshouse, a series of re-worked excerpts from the video used as a backdrop in the actual performance and a newly created freely improvised soundtrack. This will be premiered in the Vortex’s bi-monthly Mopomoso TV channel, live-streamed on Sunday at 2pm 22 March 2026 – and it will be uploaded to this page subsequently.