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Les Ballotages Fétides: a workshop with Nils Alix-Tabeling
Saturday 3 August
3 - 6pm
Join us for a poultice making workshop and conversation led by artist Nils Alix-Tabeling, enjoy a cup of herbal tea.
The workshop is part of the collaborative research project Florilege, with Rebecca Jagoe and curator Carolina Ongaro, which proposes occasions of study and practice for thinking about alternative body knowledges in the realms of medicine and herbalism.
Alix-Tabeling starts from Hildegard de Binden’s medieval conception of the body as a container for the four elements–and the use of plants and stones in this regards. Drawing from these metaphors, he attempts to connect historical conceptions of the body with possible medical progress in our near future; allowing us to broaden our understanding of living materials and our own physical being as transpecies.
The artist points at a certain form of awareness carried by the traditional knowledge of plants, which considers the human body as constant exchange of information between bacteria and cells, and where trans-species absorption and digestion processes take form.
An emphasis on synergies will be explored, and a specific attention towards certain repulsive compounds secreted by our organs will be driven. We will revisit those in the past named toxins, but now reconsidered as a secret internal–and much relevant–language of our bodies; happily putrid and metamorphic.
During this session, the artist will guide us through cleansing and balancing procedures with the making, assumption and application of diuretic herbal poultice and tea, accompanied by conversations and actions that will develop on the potential usages of the materials gathered during the session.
The workshop is free and open to all. Please RSVP to info@jupiterwoods.com to attend.
Generously supported by Fluxus Arts Projects and Arts Council England
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Florilege
Florilege is a collaborative project between artists Nils Alix-Tabeling, Rebecca Jagoe and curator Carolina Ongaro. Fluctuating between research, collective learning and forms of display, Florilege wishes to investigate approaches to knowledge-making, through engaging with the body and systems of interdependency. Medicine and forms of healing in particular will be closely considered and questioned, including their affects on spheres of life spanning the human and non-human.
Looking into medieval history and early modern cultures in the form of manuscripts, the project reads the margins as a trope in order to think about boundaries – those that contain and those that are crossed. In particular, the images at the edges of these manuscripts (referenced by art historian Michael Camille as a metaphor for the outlawed) open a reflection on extra-textual spaces of representation, and the outside as a meaningful and productive territory for ambiguity.
Standing both for herbier as well as an assemblage of pre-written texts, Florilege will gather writing and ephemera as a collection of disparate forms of knowledge in the form of a book, involving multiple collaborators and re-using classical forms of medical folios. The aim is to trouble medicine and Western science as ideologies or systems of collectively validated beliefs—and to suggest novel ways of interpreting the relations of the body with the world.
The project will unfold January - July 2019, and will be punctuated by some events. Please check out programme or send us an email at info@jupiterwoods.com if you wish to receive further information.
Florilege is kindly supported by Arts Council England and Fluxus Arts Projects