In collaboration with the University of Zurich, We Are AIA presents Botanical Memories: A Performance Series at the Botanical Garden Zurich. Taking place in the summer of 2025, this artistic program features performances, workshops, and lectures exploring both ancient and evolving knowledge of medicinal plants.

Set against the backdrop of the Botanical Garden, the series addresses the loss of traditional medicinal plant knowledge. The site's historical context fosters a dialogue on healing practices beyond Western medicine. The events will look at personal and collective relationships with plants and healing techniques, accessibility to nature, histories of migrations within human and more-than-human, and beyond.

Urban Ecotones
Saturday, September 6, 2025 / 21:00 & 23:00 / 30 minutes
New Botanical Garden, Zollikerstrasse 107, 8008 Zürich
Registration (participation is free of charge): Eventbrite

Urban Ecotones is a performance that explores the evolution of the borders of Zurich from the Ice Age to the present. From the perspective of a walker, it shifts the city’s history away from the “grand narrative” toward stories that have been displaced by urban expansion. In the Botanical Garden, two plant species that have existed in Zurich since before human settlement take center stage, serving as guides. The performance unfolds in multiple languages and incorporates objects and hanging papers that cast shadows and images onto the plexiglass structure of the greenhouses. These projections become a point of convergence between inside and outside, past and present—transforming the structure itself into an urban ecotone.

Adrián Bracho (MX, b. 1987) is a transdisciplinary artist working with performance, installation, video, text, and sound. His process-based practice is centered on exploring landscapes through walking. His main focus is on boundaries: between languages, bodies, objects, territories; past and present; speech and sound; history and fiction. Viewing borders not as lines of separation but as spaces of encounter, he seeks to question how these divides have been constructed historically.
Adrian Bracho: His work has been presented in Mexico and Europe. He holds an MA in Transdisciplinary Studies from ZHdK (CH), a BA in Composition and Music Theory from CIEM (MX).

Credit: Adrián Bracho, Urban Ecotones, 2023