Sketches for Gardening: a castle
Workshop with Milena Bonilla
A workshop on plant’s ferality, memory and diagnostics. Milena is taking us on an expedition on the ground to explore what lies in the invisible historical soil underground. The workshop consists of a walk in the area where the CCA Ujazdowski Castle is located, to have a set of encounters with plants that have (apparently) grown in the area by chance. We are going to tap into their knowledge, traditional uses, meanings, botanical takes and also stigmas, to open up a discussion about what they have to say to the Castle and its own historical legacy, as an art institution but also as a former hospital.
Everything that grows around you is speaking to you.
Tracing ideas of improvisation and spontaneity from Rosa Luxemburg and Walter Benjamin, we will explore spaces for historical healing, aided by our plant allies.
Milena Bonilla's workshop is taking place as part of the Common Field project and is made possible with the support of the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Warsaw.
Milena Bonilla
(born in 1975 in Bogotá, Colombia) works in a variety of media, including installation, video, drawing, text, public interventions and photography, exploring the relationships between economy, subjectivity, nature and culture. She lives and works in Amsterdam.
Her research-based practice is currently invested in epistemological colonialism and the different ways it affects organisms, language and social structures. By identifying patterns, gaps and silences within specific historical narratives, the artist draws tensions between predetermined political templates and uses of cognition. These conceptual and perceptual exercises appear weaved across the manifold material manifestations of her work. The work of Bonilla has been for a long time invested in the connection between the human and the plant world and in one of its latest iterations she has been researching also the herbarium of philosopher Rosa Luxemburg.
Her work has been shown in several museums including Museo d'Arte Contemporanea MACRO, Rome; Cadist Paris and San Francisco; Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam; The Mistake Room, Los Angeles Ca.; Rijksmuseum Amsterdam; Ar/Ge Art, Bolzano; The Jewish Museum, New York; MAMM, Medellín; Spring Workshop in Hong Kong; CA2M Madrid; MNBA, Buenos Aires; The Photographer's Gallery and the International Institute of Visual Arts in London; Witte de With in Rotterdam; Framer Framed, Amsterdam; Konstall C, Stockholm; Marrakech and Shanghai Bienniale parallel project, and the 12th Istanbul, 10th Havana and 3rd Bucharest Bienniales.
