Glasgow School of Art & The University of The Arts Helsinki
June 2023
Considering the conference provocation ‘On Not Knowing : How Artists Teach’, we took the invitation as an opportunity to explore how artists teach each other, across continents, cultures and the binaries of coloniser / colonised.
We hosted a walking workshop in the Glasgow Botanic Gardens - established as a site for learning, but also considered as a performative space for nature.
We shared our collaborative research in uncovering ecological histories linking UK - Mexico, re-telling stories of economic botany and the extraction of plants for resourcing the British empire.
We finished our walk with a healing ritual, cleansing the space with palo santo brought from Mexico and a facilitating a moment for reconnecting and resting with the earth - an act of collective witnessing and solidarity.
Photography by Liz Weiwiora.Reading & References :
‘Horticultural Appropriation’, Rough Trade x Garden Museum publication
From Science and Colonial expansion : the role of the British royal botanical gardens, Lucile H Brockway.
How Botanical Gardens Helped To Establish The British Empire, Jim Endersby.
Bodies Of Nature, Phul Macnaghten & John Urry.
Un Mundo Chixi Es Possible, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui
Healing The Museum, Grace Ndiritu
The Reign of “King Henequen”: The Rise and Fall of Yucatán’s Export Crop from the Pre-Columbian Era through 1930, Nyle Lucien Rioux