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The apothecary that we are proposing values the knowledges and resources stored in our bodies and lands. Making medicine together is a practice of resistance against structural violence. By building community we can understand the connections between symptoms that appear in individual bodies as indications of what might be rooted in systemic injustices. Through coming together, exchanges and conversations arise that reveal how the experiences we often feel alone with are personal and collective, shared and different. In this process, we come to understand that our experiences are never isolated, but rather exist within a wider context and can meet our bodies in the presence of others as well as the plants of the garden through their medicinal insights, engaging in healing as a collective process.

The ‘apothecary’ originally referred to both a storage space for the medicinal resources and a role in the community, the person who held these knowledges and was available as a resource to distribute them. We propose bringing these back together by acknowledging how these intuitive knowledges are held in the body as a living and intelligent repository. As such, we can reconnect our bodily navigational systems with the living world we are embedded in.

The first incarnation of this project took root in a former garden school in Berlin that was closed and overgrown, then temporarily revived as a social centre for art, ecology, and cultural practices, dedicated to the local neighbourhood.

The site is coordinated by Berlin Mondiale, a citywide network of cultural practitioners and artists of urban practice in the context of migration, asylum, and exile. At this intersection, the Social-Body Apothecary offers bridges to be built with the living knowledge and stories of migration and integration of the community through embodiment, art and healing practices. This process involved collaborations with women ranging from ages twenties to eighties, many from the neighbourhood coming from migrations backgrounds throughout the SWANA region. ‘SWANA’ stands for South West Asia & North Africa, a less colonial term for the incredibly diverse geographic area with cross-pollination of crossroads ancestries, articulated by the archival hub for the re-membrance and reclamation stewarded by River Rose Remembrance. We worked with groups of children, with visual and theatre artists of mixed abilities, among others. The hope is to provide a space where people can reconnect with their ancestral knowledge of plant life and share horizontal practices for collective health.

To begin with, the garden is mapped through organ centres, with the vagus nerve as a medicine cart that circulates among and throughout these, integrating the entire garden-body and extending into the local neighbourhood.

Each of the organs specialises in particular processes, serving their role in the whole, but never acting in isolation. The organs operate in concert with one another, collaborating and conspiring together towards the holistic vitality of the organism. We see this in the individual human body, in the garden, and potentially in movements working within wider social systems.

Organs are delicate yet resilient, they are subtle yet massive, crucial for the operation of the body yet tender. Being with the organs invites porosity, vulnerability, and resilience.

Each of the organ-dwellings is situated in relation to particular areas of the garden that correspond and plants that ally with its actions. The kidney with its filtering, relating, detoxing, and absorbing actions is situated in the water region, by the ponds and willow tree. The heart who works on connecting, pumping, circulating, orientating is situated in the wild field of goldenrod, where all directions towards the edges of the garden are in view and brought together. The stomach whose work of digesting, metabolising, processing, breaking down, and catalysing align with composting processes. The lungs who enable breathing, releasing, circulating, resonating, and grieving are matched with the moist microclimate of the greenhouses, a transparent otherworld that makes life possible in a unique way. And the liver, with its transmuting, transporting, metabolising, and detoxing actions lives in the underworld forest adjacent to the orchard, among an old oak tree and sea of evergreen ivy. The organ-dwellings are spaces to encounter these processes taking place within us, seemingly invisible but vitally palpable.

As you will see, many of the plants appear in multiple organ centres, true to their multiple relationships. The vagus nerve as a flow that roams among all the organs and its allied plants are marked to indicate their partnerships with both this particular organ and the workings of the nervous system.

What is the social body?

How does place guide us?

In human anatomy, the function of the kidneys is filtration and detoxification as well as maintaining, harmonising fluids, and distributing minerals within the fluid system. In Chinese Medicine, the energy stored within the kidneys is inherited from ancestral sources and can be sent to uplift other organs in times of need. Many indigenous medicine systems situate kidneys in relation to fear, an emotion that arises through engagement with others, with individuals, groups, and social systems, and helps us to discern danger and safety. The connection to the adrenal gland links the kidneys to the hormonal system and thus the fight and flight impulse. Kidney conditions such as the accumulation of stones or sand that produce pain and inflammation, are often due to deterioration of the relational systems in one’s life, indicating the importance of replenishing our kidneys when we may be cut off from or devalued within wider social structures.

In the water region, many streams are coming together. The traffic rushing on the street, movement down the pathway entering the garden, the ancestral influences and lineages, the fluids in the body, the frog-inhabited pond covered in algae, the dried-up pond alongside it, and the piss of various animals. Entering this biotope, how can all the multi-layered systems of relations (material, spiritual, historic, energetic, political, and ecological) inform a consideration of the net of relations you are growing within? How can you find flow through this matrix?

How can we incorporate the remains we inherit, previous incarnations of this place, to create a dwelling space for the future that can embrace us, like a hammock? How to stay in the threshold though the impulse is to escape the noise of the city. How can we give you shade and shelter, to soften our way of being? Can this space allow you to listen differently as the kidney opens into the sense-organ of the ears?

It's not always easy to encounter the ancestors when the places we move through are so marked by time, are sometimes rotting, full of multigenerational trauma, joy, and resilience or when the conditions may make access challenging. How can we include discomfort and resources within the ancestral field, offering a minimal structure for hospitality? Filtration systems are needed to discern what to let go and what to keep, like the role of the kidneys in excreting waste while absorbing what is nourishing.

The four-chambered heart is a nexus, a central intersection where the blood comes to be pumped throughout the body and through which blood by the cardiovascular system. It is a living metronome of polyrhythms. The heart participates in oxygenation, in collaboration with the lungs and brain, and distributes resources from the centre to the peripheries of the body. The heart is a pump that cares for the margins and marginalised and in Chinese Medicine is connected to the tongue, a willful anatomy that articulates the sensitivities felt by the heart.

A wild field of hops, goldenrod, evening primrose, and others sprawl out between the human-made structures. Yellow, the colour of the sun and the heart, lights up the meadow like drooping lanterns in late summer. Below, an underworld of tunnels burrowed by a family of foxes is hinted at by gaping holes here and there. This small patch of meadow feels eternal when inside of it, but turning slowly to view 360 degrees around, one can see what is situated around this heart.

The desire to dwell in this field along with a carefulness not to trample it leads us to carve a path just wide enough for a wheelchair to pass through. There, the heart is a multi-tiered space with seatings facing the different directions, a compass composed of triangles. One can of course sit in solitude there, but as a social space it allows for several people to come together while facing different directions, integrating outlooks and circulating those within the heart space. There are no ladders to climb in from the outside, so negotiation is needed amongst those co-existing within that heart, shifting positions, and trying out each other's perspectives or by active circulation freely throughout the whole structure, as embodied by a group of children. Depending on your need, one can sit close to ground level and be shielded by the goldenrods looming in full bloom above while another can sit among them, at plant height, and another occupying the bird’s eye view, exposed and floating while open to the wider context. As one of the most powerful connectors in the body, the heart of this place brings circulation between the ground level processes of the garden and the social housing neighbourhood units that surround it and ascend towards the clouds.

The building of the heart is a balancing act, bringing triangles together to connect at particular points. This process requires group collaboration and cohesion as shapes come together, raising something larger. As the different directions join with pointy tips facing down, the heart is inverted. Upside down, it anchors into the ground so spaces can open in the upper chambers. The four legs leave open a space for accessibility, so the heart can be a space for accompanying each other with/in and across differences. Inversions of the heart are happening all around us, like the directionality of a bird soaring down from sky to earth or a baby suspended in amniotic fluid or the plant’s orientation with its sexual organs floating in the air and expanded mind in the root system. Like the impulse of an EKG machine, the triangles create a zigzagging up and down rhythm, a pulse of the place, the heart is a sculptural chart of our lifeline.

I remember sowing seeds, planting heart allies around the structure, while processing a separation and hitting my head on the edge of one of its beams which sent me toppling onto my rear, a shock that homeopathically matched and mirrored my internal state.

The stomach is a metaboliser, a transformer along the journey our sustenance takes, from the mouth’s ingestion all the way to the release of the anus. The stomach processes and breaks down matter, contracting and relaxing to facilitate the pumping and digestion process, serving also as a storage space for the integration of nourishment. Different rates of metabolism are happening simultaneously, just as in the compost pile decomposition processes create multiple generations of soil.

In human childhood development, taste is one of the earliest modes of perceiving the world around us. The mouth as a portal to the stomach and spleen link in Chinese Medicine to the emotions of worry or over-thinking, digesting emotions and thoughts through those feelings of butterflies when speaking in front of a crowd or a heavy stone when needing to acknowledge something weighty.

Asking the children, ‘what kind of place would you need when your stomach aches?’ they sculpted embracing, swinging structures where they can feel held and soothed by movement. The stomach as a swing combines child-like joy and playfulness and the self-regulation of one’s own nervous system rocking back and forth, a cradle suspended in the air – the feeling of flying while anchored. The stomach invites a process of finding balance points, minimal attachments for stability so that the structure can rock evenly while enabling freedom and autonomy of pace, potentially enabling it to attach securely to other limbs in other times and places.

The organ-dwellings, and the practice of dwelling within our organ environments, invite experience from another perspective. Though the organs seem outwardly invisible and untouchable, we can connect with internal experiences supported by architectural re-imaginings; spending time in these spaces, among the allying plants, offers another possible experience of the internal. Simultaneously, they serve a particular function, offering particular modes of being with/in the garden.

How can you see from inside? How does your experience of seeing out shift your senses? How might that inform your readings of bodies in place? How can the act of dwelling be resourceful, an anchor point to work with the flow of the whole, rippling into wider social scales, and all the connectivities within those layers?

The size of the structures invite you to place yourself inside, they invite you into an embodied experience of being within the organ itself. The different seating positions creates different relations by the positionality of your body in the place. Providing a frame, the dwellings offer particular postures to relate with your own body, with the place, and with others.

The design strategy we embraced involved minimal structures that are held together with the minimal crossings needed to create stability. The lines of wood always form a skeleton which leaves space for others – for air, for sun, for plants to take over, for unknown experiences. The structures are meant as a helping hand, to facilitate encounter, enabling embodied knowings to become more available and palpable. The wooden structures offer clarity, with the minimal geometry to hold you. All the while, these constructions are vulnerable themselves. They are impacted by weather, by visitors, by wear and tear, by the unexpected and uncontrollable autonomous life within the place.

All the plants are always many. They are beings of complexity, rife with contradictions, extending across spectrums, their themes speaking in subtle nuances beyond the scope of polarities. These plants support multiple aspects and systems within the body and socio-ecological context simultaneously. While we focus on the organs here, the actions of the plants work in concert with other layers. The point is not to divide them, isolate, or extract their components, but to see how this multiplicity indicates that there are many ways to aid or support the social body from different perspectives. The plants work to address what is needed through medicinal dialogue. We value engagement with these plants as healers, teachers, collaborators, and allies, to work reciprocally, dialogically and dynamically. We provide questions as openers for contemplation and (re)consideration in hopes that they foster more questions rather than offering cures, promises, or solutions. Here we focus on story-telling that weaves together many different sources and streams of information and experiential knowledge. We draw guidance from feminists of colour, whose voices we honour throughout this collection. Our intention is to offer these as seeds and pathways for you to enter into relations with the plants that grow around you, whether these ones or others and hope this resource can support and enhance your own capacity to perceive and read your body within context.

Why dwellings? Structures - architectural and social

What are medicinal processes? How we relate to the plants

Download the Social Body Apothecary Field Guide:

Social Body Apothecary is a project of Neue Häute e.V.

Berlin, Campus Dammweg October 2021 - November 2023
A project in cooperation with Berlin Mondiale, Urbane Praxis, Kulturnetzwerk Neukölln, supported by Fonds Darstellende Künste / Prozessförderung

Artistic direction: Shelley Etkin, Siegmar Zacharias
Conception/Design architectural sculptures: Kitti Zsiga
Project coordination Nachbarschaftscampus: Anna de Carlo
Project production: Paz Ponce
Workshops contributions by: Mojisola Adebayo, Shannon Cooney, Shelley Etkin, Claudia Hill, Fadima Sevun, Xenia Taniko Dwertmann, Siegmar Zacharias

Construction team: Construct Lab (Jan Stricker & Andries de Lange), Gabriel Nyantakyi
Construction assistance: Lilja Waehneldt, Paule Potulski, Amaranta M. Castillo
Graphic design publication: Lilja Waehneldt, Paule Potulski
Texts publication: Shelley Etkin, Siegmar Zacharias

The liver is a transformer and transporter.
The largest solid organ in the human body, its role is essential in digestion, metabolising the nutrients we ingest into forms the body can integrate, storing and supplying them to the cells, and producing bile. Likewise, the liver can transmute toxic substances, breaking them down to produce energy or converting them to become harmless or allowing them to be released. The liver redistribut0with the emotion of anger, as articulated in Chinese Medicine, expressed through the eyes as its sense organ.
Anger serves a purpose; rage can mobilise our care to be put into action, can clear toxicity and serve as a positive motion towards ushering change. However the accumulation of anger can lead to excess, stuckness or inhibition of its power and, especially if that is turned inwardly, can also become debilitating and destructive.
The liver is particularly active in the springtime when the upthrust of the buds push through the soil’s gravity, leaning into resistance to allow emergence above ground.