KONTAMINÁCIE: PLANTS AS GUIDES AND ALLIES IN SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION - PART 2

Duration: 90 min.

 

Based on the idea of the Social Body Apothecary we ask in this workshop, how the structural violences of the social body manifests in the personal body, and how caring for the personal body with the help of plant allies can feed back into transformative processes within the social body. We will work with plants from the area and our collective sensations, concerns and intentions.We intend to let ourselves be guided and activated by plants in our processes of anxiety, grief, and change. We will engage in somatic mapping of diverse knowledge and make a remedy together. This workshop will stretch across two days, participation on both days is preferred but not mandatory.

 

Shelley Etkin is a transdisciplinary artist, educator, gardener and herbalist. Her research engages with relations between bodies and lands through the intersections of place-based and multi-local knowledges, particularly in connection with the plant world. Through socially engaged processes in community contexts that integrate practices from herbal medicine, embodiment and ecological collaboration, she asks questions about land stewardship, migration, ancestral knowledges, and social-ecological transformation. She initiated the Garden as Studio platform for artistic research into garden as body and body as garden and co-facilitates the Social Body Apothecary, working with plants as allies for marginalised communities. Shelley is currently pursuing a PhD in Sociology/Ethnobotany (UCC Ireland) and teaches in a range of contexts, from community organisations to universities. She holds an MA in Ecology & Contemporary Performance (Finland) as well as a BA in Gender Studies (USA) and has training in permaculture design with Earth Activist Training as well as homeopathy.

 

Siegmar Zacharias was born in Romania and lives in Berlin. She is a performance artist, researcher, and a trained death doula. She works with ancestral and contemporary herbalism and plant medicine making. At the intersection of art, radical pedagogy and activism, she works collaboratively learning from grieving. The work generates performances, immersive installations, encounters and durational projects that address generative ethical dynamics of transformation. Since 2016 she has been organising "Training for political imaginaries", 24hrs festivals where ecologies of artistic and social practice are shared. Together with Steve Heather, she developed the somacoustic listening sessions WAVES – listening towards social bodies as containers for collective grieving. Her work with plant beings asks what can we learn if we engage with plants as ancestors, guides and allies. Together with Shelley Etkin, Kitti Zsiga, and women in a post-migrant neighbourhood in Berlin they have developed the SocialBodyApothecary valuing the knowledges and resources stored in our bodies and lands, practicing making medicine together as a decolonial practice of resistance against structural violence. 2018-2023 She received a TECHNE - Innovative Excellence Research Fellowship at University Roehampton London for her PhD project: Erotics of Grieves. Somacoustic listening towards visceral response-abilities.