Histories and Practices of Care in Eastern Europe & the Baltics, 1-10 May 2024
Soon after the 2nd Socialist Herbalism gathering in Sept ’23, the ongoing genocide in Gaza against Palestinian people began. Since then, we have been witnessing multiple genocides, ecocides, epistemicides driven by white supremacist, colonial-capitalist forces.
For our 3rd Socialist Herbalism Gathering we call for a focus on Land & Grief, to engage with what we have been feeling for the past 6 months, with our positions and orientations, with our collective relationships to land.
We aim to sit with our initial queer and disability-informed questions of care, healing and the more-than-human in artistic and community living and practice. We would like to look closer at the historical European Socialist visions of the environment, science, and the use of alternative medicines, and how these sit in conversation with global queer and feminist modalities, imaginations, and practices of care, which revisit herbalism as a community practice.
We warmly invite you to join with the intention of sharing knowledges, ideas and experiences of herbal histories whilst being engaged in practices of communal living and working, as part of the process of being in a temporary collective. Sharing can happen in the kitchen, in the garden, whilst handling medicinal herbs from the apothecary, whilst doing some of the never-ending reproductive and care labour that soil, plants, human-made environments with roofs, and our own bodies need.
Details about the research project
This collaborative and interdisciplinary project engages with contemporary feminist, queer and disability-informed questions of care, healing and the more-than-human in artistic and community living and practice. It investigates historical European Socialist visions of the environment, science, and the use of alternative medicines, and sets these in conversation with global queer and feminist modalities, imaginations, and practices of care, which revisit herbalism as a community practice. This geographical and historical area is of particular interest first due to the role of the Socialist states in extraction and economic value-production around medicinal plants, echoing the colonial European extractive drive toward plant matter and plant knowledge. Secondly, most of these practices and healing modalities are pre-socialist and stem from a variety of cumulative knowledges about more-than-human entities, about healing of the human body and a relationship to land and landscape. This present is inextricably embedded in white supremacist and etno-nationalist processes of nation- building, as much as unacknowledged forms of oppression of human and plant life. A clear example of these oppressive histories is the 19th century Romanian history of enslavement of Roma peoples, and the simultaneous extraction, dismissal and punishment (as witchcraft) of medicinal knowledges and practices belonging to Roma communities.
The project wants to ask questions about the scales of these histories and their co-presence with state violence, as well as their role as modalities of healing, by holding a number of Herbal Gatherings on the topic, bringing together academic researchers, artists and curators, herbalists, environmental scientists, and ethnobotanists.
Expressions of Interest
If you would like to attend the gathering in person, please send a max 200-word paragraph about your practices/ research/ research-as practice / practice-as-research and how you resonate with the larger project and the intentions of the gathering to m.brebenel@soton.ac.uk.
Costs
There is no charge for attending this gathering, funding is being sought out for the project but has not been secured, so you would need to be ready to cover your own travel and the costs of staying in Massia for the period (see here about a sliding scale) plus a 12 euro membership fee (valid for 12 months). We can organise communal food buying and preparation (7 euro/day /person).
Access
Travel info is accessible here. Unfortunately, the building is not barrier- free and doesn’t meet accessibility standards for wheelchair users. There are no ramps and no elevator. To enter the building, one needs to climb 6 steps, followed by 3cm high thresholds, which are part of the door frames. On the ground floor there are bedrooms, studios, the theatre hall, toilets and a shower. The kitchens are both located on the upper floor. To get to the 1st floor one needs to climb two flights of stairs.
We aim to make the Gathering accessible in terms of needs around food (dietary requirements, preferences, times of meals), needs around sleeping arrangements, sensory needs, social time/spending time alone, schedule of activities and timings for these, other commitments that need attended to. We will try to make these decisions together in the time leading up to the meeting and in the first days and allow for flexibility in the schedule we decide on. If you would like to communicate any access needs, please include these in the expression of interest.