Weeding Together

Weeding together: a plant-inspired collaborative xerox publication was a workshop developed in collaboration with Layla Durrani, facilitated at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy on Nov 6th, 2020.

Weeding together started with a tea ritual, tasting calendula and yarrow, and an introduction to the legacies of herbal healing as a (fragmented) feminized practice that was actively diminished in the development of the western medical discourse. (Re)turning to herbal knowledges reforms current healing modalities into collective practices. Herbal healers/witches/midwives were the healers of the people, the healers who acknowledged the interconnectedness of human health and our natural worlds as well as many other inter-(more-than-)human connections, whereas the western medical tradition tried to sterilize and individualize the human body and parts within as an object of study.

After the introduction, we spent the day discussing two herbs in specific: Calendula and Yarrow, and each student created one a4 page of the zine that we printed and compiled at the end of the day.