PlanteSorcières was born with the aim of investigating the possible relationships between a knowledge rooted in different territories and the international history of the women persecution, both in the past and in the present. More specifically, we are interested in deepening the role played by the introduction of the traditional medicine and the beginning of the witches hunting, and to discover how these resistance practices have been – are – adopted to react to the disappearance of banished or condemned knowledge altering the social order.
Plants and women are connected with the lunar cycle and the universe, for several years women were, in fact, the guardians of most of the knowledge we inherit about nature: we want to recognize the legacy coming from this deep connection, condemned by modern western thought, and in so doing it through the practice of listening, feeling, respecting and working in collaboration.
PlanteSorcières is an ongoing project composed of different actions based on field research, that started with a series of travels through the Valais where we met women and learnt from them about the plants originally used in that territory to heal. Part of our idea was to learn both how to use those plants and how to take care of them, sharing that knowledge with other people. To do that we conceived and built a special device to transport the plants from the Valais to Lausanne, with the idea of installing them in the public space, so that the people who were passing by could interact with them. We realised a performative action: we travelled with the plants from Sierre to Lausanne both by foot and by train and we installed them in Le Espace Récréatif de La Grenette. In order to share the knowledge we received, we created a fanzine that can be accessed through our blog.
plantasbrujas.art.blog 