In collaboration with the Botanical Garden of the University of Zurich, We Are AIA presents Botanical Memories: A Performance Series. Taking place in the summer of 2025, this artistic program features performances, workshops, and arts-and-science-talks exploring both ancient and evolving knowledge of medicinal plants.
What knowledge about medicinal plants – shaped by people, place, and tradition – should be remembered and passed down?
Various performances and workshops followed by art and science talks invite you to a public exchange about healing practices beyond Western medicine and the history of plants. Together with healing practitioners and ethnobotanists, artists will explore how art can raise public awareness of alternative healing methods and the connection with nature.
Bodies of Nature
Sunday, May 25, 2025 / 16:00 / 90 minutes
Old Botanical Garden, Talstrasse 71, 8001 Zürich
Registration (participation is free of charge): Eventbrite
In Bodies of Nature, the artist Nika Timashkova invites visitors to a walking meditation along the paths of Botanical Garden in a poetic, performative search for traces. Rooted in embodied storytelling, the performance sharpens the attention to the subtle and overlooked, calling for a deeper presence within the garden’s living ecosystem.
Through the embodied figures of mythological creatures, shedding their coats as the nature itself, the artist explores the connections between bodies, plants, rituals, and shared memory. Natural elements like water, earth, and plants are woven into the experience, forming an archive of the site, that exists only in the moment and lingers in the sensorial memory of those who witness it.
Curated by Olena Iegorova.
Nika Timashkova (UA/CH) is a multidisciplinary artist born in Ukraine and raised in Switzerland. Drawing on her experience of navigating multiple cultural identities, her work emerges from the intersections of personal history and collective memory. Her artistic research explores notions of belon- ging, home, and the human relationship to place and nature. Timashkova’s practice moves fluidly between performance, installation, and other media, often grounded in site-specificresearch and collaborative processes. Through embodied narratives and poetic interventions, she explores the comple- xities of everyday life, offering alternative modes of sensing, knowing, and remembering. Timashkova is a co-founder of somebody*ies art collective operating between Basel, Frei- burg and Mulhouse.
Olena Iegorova (UA/CH) is an independent curator, art media- tor and founder of SITE SPECIFIC platform. Olena holds a mas- ter’s degree in Romano-Germanic philology and an advanced degree in curating from ZHdK. Her curatorial approach centers on diverse formats for audience engagement and participatory initiatives, exploring the intersection of art, education, digital culture, and social sciences. She has led numerous large-scale projects, including overseeing the public program of Zurich Art Weekend 23, curating international collaborations like Perfor- ming Kyiv hosted by Cabaret Voltaire, Schauspielhaus Zurich and Löwenbräukunst, mediating for Luma Foundation, and contributing to art publications like Reading Rämistrasse.
Credit: Nika Timashkova, “The Future”, 2024.
