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.

Editor: Marjolein van der Loo
Graphic: Elisa Piazzi