Amber Byrne Mahoney

No trace of a single session of the [Salem] witchcraft court survives. We have accounts of the trials but no records; we are left with preparatory papers — depositions, indictments, confessions, petitions — and two death warrants. The Salem village record book has been expunged. No newspaper yet circulated in a North American colony. While the bewitched commanded a rapt audience for much of a year, their voices are lost to us. Their words come to us exclusively from men who were far from thorough, seldom impartial, and not always transcribing in the room in which they heard those statements…Salem comes down to us pockmarked by seventeenth century deletions and studded with nineteenth-century inventions. 

— Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692

Through attention, moving and still imagery, field recordings, poetry, storytelling, research, and the guidance of wonder I hope to interrupt the narrative we have inherited surrounding the witch trials in seventeenth century Salem and encourage instead an imaginative rethinking of evidence — not as neutral and unfeeling but as emotional and deeply subjective — as something shaped and formed by its namer. I hope to challenge the notion of one historical and authoritative truth; of history itself as authority. Instead I propose: history is a translation; it is human, it is emotive, it is unreliable and vulnerable to our wondering, to questioning, to asking, if “…no two people ever hear precisely the same sound” — as the curator and author Lauren van Haaften-Schick writes in her essay What is the Shape and Feel of the In-between? — then what does this mean for this thing we call truth? (And how can I even ask such a thing at a time like this one? But then again: how can I not?) Finally, I hope to invite the following consideration: the logic of the trials does not live in history alone — it exists here and today.