Meet Factory, Prague
29 June to 22 August 2021
The international group exhibition Planted in the Body looks into plants as sources and carriers of knowledge, and explores more precisely how the unique knowledge flora has been holding for centuries is transmitted. It highlights matrilineal and ancestral chains’ roles in preserving and passing down nature’s teachings. The latter are extremely diverse and touch on the realm of medicine, spirituality, survival skills, food practices, traumas and political memories.
At its core, the exhibition endorses the notion of ‘plantcestors’, considering that the non-linear knowledge channelled through vegetation can be accessed without intermediaries and is planted in our bodies. Common resources are our best teachers to live in ecological balance. This explains the importance of indigenous knowledges — ones that have been severely lost through the imperial, colonial and capitalist dominations — to learn how to live in harmony with the vegetal, animal, mineral, spiritual and ancestral worlds. In this, some works featured envision regenerative practices for landscapes, soils and bodies.
If plants are vessels, then we should act as recipients of their heritage. Works in the exhibition Planted in the Body address all these issues looking into our common kinship as well as into the future, and tell sidelined histories and narratives.
Artists: Nikola Brabcová (CZ) & Alexandra Cihanská Machová (SK), Laura Huertas Millán (CO), Suzanne Husky (FR/USA), Saodat Ismailova (UZ), Emily Kame Kngwarreye (AU), Uriel Orlow (CH/UK), Solange Pessoa (BR), Luiza Prado de O. Martins (BR), Corinne Silva (UK), Adéla Součková (CZ). Curated by Clelia Coussonnet & Tereza Jindrová
Planted in the Body installation view, MeetFactory, Prague, 2021