PLANTS ARE MEMORY
AND HANDS ARE INSTRUMENTS OF CARE

PROJECT CONTEXT

BoWB / Art Pluriverse

This project was developed within the Biennale of Western Balkans (BoWB), as part of the Art Pluriverse program.

Collaborative Practice

Developed by Nikos Voyiatzis and Antigoni Cheilari in collaboration with the cultural association of Pera Melana.

RESEARCH FRAME

Healing Plants

The project explores medicinal plants as living archival systems, embedded in oral transmission and embodied knowledge.

Folk Medicine

Traditional healing practices are treated as distributed epistemologies, outside institutional scientific classification.

Material Knowledge

Plants are understood not as objects of study but as agents of memory, embedded in landscape, care, and repetition.

Hands as Archive

Hands function as interfaces of transmission—gestural, tactile, and intergenerational carriers of knowledge.

DOCUMENTATION as a visual diary

THEORETICAL POSITION

Post-Custodial Knowledge

Knowledge is not stored in institutions but distributed across bodies, landscapes, and informal cultural systems.

Situated Epistemologies

Healing practices are situated, local, and relational rather than universal.

Embodied Archiving

Memory is not only recorded—it is performed through gesture, touch, and care.

KEY IDEA

Distributed Botanical Archive

Plants, hands, and community knowledge form a non-institutional archive where care functions as a method of preservation.

THE ARCHIVE LIVES IN THE GESTURE