Ana Likar’s art project Marina Češarek Gallery is based on witch trials, the prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft, and their association with natural disasters and medicinal plants, the absurd accusations and torture that accompanied them, and absence of any perspective of the accused. The unknowns, antagonisms and unresolved questions associated with these trials led the artist to lay the groundwork for the project by turning to the existing transcripts, historic literature and contemporary feminist interpretations. Her collaborator in these efforts is Tea Hvala, a writer, editor, critic and translator with the BA in comparative literature and sociology, and MA in gender anthropology, whose areas of expertise span feminist theory, activism and art, and who inspired the project at multiple levels already during the preparation for the collaboration under the EMPACT project. Tea’s most notable works include the Slovenian translation of one of the seminal texts on the history of witch trials, Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2020), and A Path of Their Own: Excursions into Women’s History (2021), a travel guide project where she served as editor. The travel guide includes a trip to Ribnica, which was one of the main reasons that triggered the artist’s interest in witch trials in Slovenia

The first step in this collaboration consists mainly of the dialogue that discusses the existing literature and the dilemmas involved in dealing with historical unknowns and essentialisms that may arise from the juxtaposition of witch trials, magic, natural disasters and medicinal plants, which entails a certain risk of eiterating the very arguments that have historically contributed to oppression. The two collaborators thus begin by discussing the existing representations of historical trials, feminist interpretations of women’s connection with nature, and reference books. They focus in particular on the work of science historian Carolyn Merchant and her books The Death of Nature (1980) and Autonomous Nature (2016), in which she recognized parallels between the methods involved in scientific investigation of nature and interrogation of witches, and the fact that the elements exemplified nature’s most intractable aspect that evaded the control of the scientific method the most persistently.