Camden Art Audio

For the final podcast of the series, Ros Gray and Shela Sheikh introduce how planting was central to colonialism and explain why it is vital that we recognise the ongoing effects of colonial botany and the plantation system. They discuss how gardens – from botanical collections to municipal parks – are historical sites of exclusion and labour as well as leisure and enjoyment, detailing the hierarchies that exist within these spaces, and describing how artists have actively sought to decolonise these spaces through planting with reference to ongoing projects in London.

Queer Nature explores the little-known, often-overlooked and rare intimate behaviour of the botanical world. Investigating the relationships between ecological thought and queer theory to celebrate the multitude of shapes, gender, sexes and colours that exist around us. Landscape architect Céline Baumann describes the journey that led her to discover and examine diversity within the plant kingdom.

Dr Stephan Harding explains how Gaia Alchemy integrates the sciences of the Earth with alchemical approaches to psyche so we can live harmoniously within the limits of our planet.

Although the development of science has given us many benefits, its predominance has made us into detached observers fundamentally disconnected from each other and from nature. And yet, in our own time, science has given us detailed knowledge about the evolution of our Earth – Gaia - whilst depth psychology in the guise of alchemy provides us with profound insights about the workings of the human psyche.

Dr Harding holds a doctorate in ecology from the University of Oxford and is the Resident Ecologist and Deep Ecology Research Fellow at Schumacher College, where he co-founded (with Professor Brian Goodwin) and co-ordinated the MSc in Holistic Science for the last two decades. He is author of Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia, his first book. His forthcoming book is called Gaia Alchemy.

Musician Sarah Angliss (London, UK) draws on the botanical writing of Hildegard von Bingen, a twelfth-century Christian mystic, to help make sense of her own experiences of illness, healing and the turn of the season while the city is in lockdown. Sarah immerses us in a sonic fever dream, using fragments of Hildegard's texts on herbal medicine to explore her personal experiences of fever as she examines Hildegard's ecstatic visions.

The Amazon Rainforest is the world's most abundant pharmacopeia - filled with countless plants that are used traditionally to heal physical, psychological and spiritual ailments. The traditional healers who live here say that they receive their knowledge as transmissions from the plants themselves during periods of solitary retreat in the jungle.

In this podcast, Gina Buenfeld - Co-Curator of The Botanical Mind - describes some of her experiences in the Amazon rainforest alongside recordings of Justina - a Maestra (healer) from the Shipibo-Conibo people, an ethnic group living along the Ucayali River in the Amazonian rainforest in Peru - to provide a rare insight into physical and spiritual relationships with sacred plants.

For the last three years, Gina Buenfeld (Curator, Camden Art Centre), been researching traditional plant healing in Europe, Central and South America. In particular, she has spent time in the Colombian, Peruvian and Brazilian areas of the Amazon Rainforest learning about the plant-knowledge and healing practices of indigenous, and mestizo, communities.

Leading scientist of plant cognition, Monica Gagliano (Australia), presents a new understanding of the vegetal world. She argues that, in order to understand plant sentience we need to radically rethink our definitions of intelligence and consciousness to move away from a human-centric model.

Through a survey of plant capabilities from sight, smell and touch to communication, the podcast will challenge our notion of intelligence, presenting a vision of plant life that is more sophisticated than most imagine.