Botanical Memories: A Performance Series

Botanical Memories: A Performance Series

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.

The series invites the public to engage with artistic practices that draw on traditional wisdom, offering an opportunity to explore alternative healing methods and reconnect with nature—healing holistically as individuals within an ecosystem. Organised in collaboration with traditional healers and the Botanical Garden’s ethnobotanists, the program encourages an exchange of knowledge and perspectives.

We will kick off the performance series, with Simon Grab and Lika Nüssli, a collaboration which sees sounds by sound artist Grab inspired by the surrounding plants translated into movements and onto a canvas by Nüssli. The listening session by <Invernomuto> takes us through a journey with them to a explore the history and the stories around a unique ecosystem in rainwater-filled pools carved into the rocks of Pietra Perduca in northern Italy. During Petra Serhal’s performance, which draws from ancient witchcraft knowledge, visitors are invited to experience the benefit of different plants traditionally used as medicine. Neyen Pailamilla will engage in a reciprocal healing process with a Pewen tree in the Botanical Garden, a sacred tree for the Mapuche culture, reflecting on the experience of diaspora shared by the artist and the tree. Nora Hauswirth, Maya Minder and Kaspar Koenig will invite visitors to experience and exchange with the presence of microbes in soil while learning about their role in preserving healthy ecosystems and human well-being. The end of summer also marks the end of this year’s performance series. Adrian Bracho, and his research on the development of Zurich’s city limits from the end of the last ice age to the present day through the lenses of two local plant species, will conclude the series.

Caption: Neyen Pailamilla, Plantear, 2020, Zurich.