Jana Zatvarnická

Herbarium of Ghosts (2022–2023)
 

My project Herbarium of Ghosts builds on research conducted at the botanical collection of the Klassik Stiftung Weimar and the archive of the National Herbarium at the University of the West Indies in St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago, where I studied herbarium specimens dating from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. During this research, I focused on the ethnobotany and migration histories of medicinal plants, particularly those shaped by the colonial histories of European countries between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The project draws inspiration from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s concept of the Urpflanze (primordial plant). Building on Goethe’s idea, I perceive plants as collective, sentient bodies engaged in a universal creative process. Through this perspective, I explore how we might reassess our collective bodies and shared consciousness in order to imagine more hopeful and regenerative futures.