Herbal Audition

For their work herbal auditions Magda Drozd and Salomé Voegelin will explore the medieval herb garden created in honour of Conrad Gessner a Swiss herbalist from the 16th Century. Through listening and sound recording they seek entanglements with plants, roots, leaves and earth, to consider their contribution to medicine and knowledge. However, they stay clear of latin names and taxonomical organisations. Instead, they seek to hear in the material of plants and the narratives of herbalists, the complex and contradictory tensions between a contemporary embracing of alternative medicine as pure and inherently good, and its concurrent shunning as cultish and expressive of a liberalist anti-vaxx movement; and consider the pharmaceutical developments of contemporary medicine as at once seen to be progressive and sustaining of life, while at the same time representing the evils and manipulations of neo-liberal markets and governance.
These tensions are explored by sounding the in-between: between bodies, plants, narratives, medicine, viruses, earth and the air connecting all of them. The material for the sound performance will be pre-recorded on site and transformed and enriched during an artistic process into a composition that can be heard in the garden. The place itself, that is considered a local recreation area, where the population can have their short rest from the busy city life, will also resonate within the performance and give the listeners the possibility to reflect on the knowledge we gained and lost during the time and how we understand healing, health, bodies, plants, and medicine now.

Sonic Topologies, residency and performance with Magda Drozd in Zürich, CH, 20.06.-27.06.2022 organised by Landscape Architecture ETH.