GUERRILLA DRUGSTORE. FEMALE WISDOM AND PHARMACY

Guerrilla Drugstore is a transdisciplinary and antidisciplinary, grassroots action for people who sow utopia and harvest reality. A grassroots pharmacy of medicinal plants that were once oppressed, capitalised, forgotten and made invisible, which are now being revived from Barcelona and beyond through a self-managed, caring network of plant, animal and human beings.

Guerrilla Drugstore arrives at the CA2M Museum, where a new pharmacy will be set up dedicated to menopause-friendly plants. This action creates an alliance between wise women and plants, through the creation of a hanging garden dedicated to the health of women experiencing menopause.

A space will be prepared on the museum’s roof terrace for experimentation with growing plants and textile art where we can offer mutual care, which will include plants with phyto-oestrogenic properties and what we can learn from them. The implicit intention is to promote our well-being by redefining menopause as a time of transformation and deep reconnection with ourselves and with each other.

The workshop will be held in four sessions:

LEARNING FROM PLANTS 19 April 11:30am–1:30pm

We’ll be approaching the subject of plants associated with menopause management from the perspective of participatory ethnobotany and by collectively compiling our knowledge and remedies. During the session, we’ll begin to create the hanging structure that will house the plants.

PLANTING KNOWLEDGE 20 April 11:30am–1:30pm

We will take a closer look at our new friends. We’ll be learning how to plant them from seed and care for them, and about their uses and particular properties. A Guerrilla seed-planting workshop that will unite us forever with these forgotten plants that should have a place in our medicinal garden.

CONVERSATION BY CROCHET 10 May 11:30am–1:30pm

The session is devoted to crocheting the structure that houses the plants. The action of hands interlocking stitches allows words to circulate, creating a space for dialogue, sharing and caring.

INSTALLATION OF THE TEXTILE PLANT STRUCTURE 24 May 11:30am–1:30pm

During the last session we’ll be completing and installing the structure on the roof terrace of the museum, and attaching our plant friends to it. It will be a place of celebration and culmination of the entire process in which we hope to be able to enjoy what we have acquired both on a personal and human level, as well as in terms of ancestral knowledge, as wise women of an ethnobotanical world that is reborn through this project.

Margherita Isola, artist, performer, dancer of Mediterranean origin. She lives and works with no permanent address, currently residing in Barcelona. Her practice involves experiments with different media – dance, installation, performance art, textile art, community art – and deals with such themes as feminism, migration, colonialism and the capitalisation of Gaia – in order to reconsider new forms of life-centric interdependencies. She has presented her work at the ISELP contemporary art centre, Brussels; 2011 Dance Biennale, Charleroi;  Fashion & Lace Museum, Brussels; Choreographic Centre, Rio de Janeiro; National Museum of Natural History and Science, Lisbon; FAAP, São Paulo; and MACBA Studies and Documentation Centre, Barcelona, among others. In synergy with her practice, she has gained experience in the social and educational field by giving workshops for young people and women, mostly in vulnerable situations.

Xisela García Moure is a teacher of agroecology, permaculture and techniques specialising in urban food gardens and sustainable food systems. She has been a member of the Instituto de Transición Rompe el Círculo (‘Break the Circle Transition Institute’) collective since its foundation in 2014, and since that time has been collaborating in all its training and dissemination activities, including lectures on energy transition and visions of new models of society, the most outstanding of which are her Visualización Móstoles 2030 project and the implementation of the Hamacódromo (‘hammockodrome’) In Parque Finca Liana. She has been collaborating with the CA2M Museum since 2013 on its Roof Terrace Food Garden project, and has been actively involved in the organisation and management of urban and semi-urban community gardens since 2009.