Rising from the Ashes

Where do witchcraft and mourning intersect? A question visual anthropologist Yalou van der Heijden suddenly cannot avoid. Her father and both her grandfathers unexpectedly die during her research into ceremonial work at the largest sisterhood and medicine women training in the Netherlands (Lands of the Setting Sun). Grief takes over her reality as well as her research. Emotions, like witchcraft, turn out to be rooted in the inexplicable: in our inability to verbally translate experiences others have not lived through.

In Rising from the Ashes, Yalou takes you on her quest to explain witchcraft and her feelings of loss and grief to her deceased father. Is there a space to feel what is not always understood?