AGELANTHUS, 2021
online︎︎︎ with Eliana N’Zualo
09.2021 — 09.2022
Agelanthus is an online digital installation under construction on the hemi-parasitic plants native to the Afrotropical realm, which maps the flows that depart from this plant to anthropocentric issues. The work was developed in a residency during the month of September, in the Cross-Cultural Collaboration program, organized by wendy.network, between the interdisciplinary Portuguese artist Catarina Braga and the Mozambican artist and writer Eliana N’Zualo.
Through a collection of images, information, catalogs and mappings, an exercise of associations and critical construction on human structures - political, social, imagery, and scientific – around the agelanthus plant genus is proposed. Originating from research linked to the plant's botany, the installation grows as a plural and eclectic archive that includes quotes from books on scientific literature, philosophy, and ecological thinking, with prose and poetry written by the artist Eliana, with photographs, drawings, herbaria, maps, images and links that point us outwards and to everything that exists beyond the plant.
With the construction of the website, the artists intend to stimulate the various discourses that come from the production of knowledge and history of the plant. We can think about the Portuguese and Afro-descendant diaspora, but also about the vegetal diaspora, about the colonial relations between Portugal and Mozambique, about the nature of language, the representation of knowledge and the digital mediation.
