The Eindhoven-based Onomatopee publishing house has long been an important part of our program. We are therefore delighted that we are now able to present two titles from this publisher.
Under the title “Three Becomes a Tree”, editor Marjolein Van Der Loo, artist Leonie Brandner and publisher Natasha Rijkhoff will present the two books “A Tree - A Reader On Arboreal Kinship” and “Three Becomes Two Becomes One Becomes None - cosmopoiesis of mandragoras”.
A multimedia evening awaits you, and special herbal teas will be served. Admission is free!
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"A Tree, - A Reader on Arboreal Kinship":
A Tree, is about vegetal agency, plant knowledge, and the interaction between plants and people, with a specific focus on trees. Like all plants, trees make the world; they literally create soil, shape landscapes, and affect the climate. They produce oxygen. They provide fuel, food, building materials, and shelter, and form ecologies where a myriad of species come together to enter into various symbiotic partnerships. Trees are wonderful to think with, and humans have been doing so—through meditation, in all kinds of storytelling, and as partners in problem-solving—probably for as long as they have walked the earth. Trees are also time tellers, rather than following industrial time, clock time, or any time defined by human activity, trees relate to their own experience of time.
Through this reader, the aim is to nurture and encourage dialogues and to share inspiration on exercising arboreal kinship by taking the time to think about trees differently through imagination, art, music, storytelling, poetry, and images. Moreover, the contributions in A Tree, inspire us to move beyond large systems of oppression and towards exorcizing anthropocentrism, capitalism, individualism, heteronormativity, and coloniality, by learning from and with tree time.
With written contributions by Joss Allen, Céline Baumann, Bárbara Sánchez Barroso, Jorge Menna Barreto, Renée Bus, Lucy Davis, Amirio Freeman, Manjot Kaur, Marjolein van der Loo, Karen Lofgren, Anne Richter, Jerrold Saija, Oscar Salguero, Jonmar van Vlijmen and Müge Yilmaz.
Visual contributions by Gerbrand Burger, Chihiro Geuzenbroek, Femke Habets, Roderick Hietbrink, Ingela Ihrman, Mari Keski-Korsu, Alice Ladenburg, Hira Nabi, Frank Resseler and Sanne Vaassen.
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"Three Becomes Two Becomes One Becomes None - cosmopoiesis of mandragoras":
The mandragora plant is one of the best recorded gynaecological herbal substances. It is also the only plant in the European context historically depicted as a half-human-half-plant-creature. The mandragora was, is and continues to be haunted by stories. Could its many stories hold a key for luring our minds off paths that have been sufficiently trodden down? What if the mandragora holds the potential for new orders and for world-making; for a cosmopoeisis of mandragoras.
Three Becomes Two Becomes One Becomes None explores the medicinal and magical mandragora plant, and the many stories that grew around it across history. Artist Leonie Brandner's writing moves from the beginning of recorded storytelling to ancient Egyptian and Greek mythology, tracing the lines the mandragora has left behind in medicinal books, folklore and eventually the impact the plant had in the hunt on so-called witches in the Middle Ages. Gently weaving her own perception and encounters with the plant through her rigorous historical research, Leonie Brandner creates a kaleidoscopical image of human-plant-imaginations across time.
