Plants_Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant

Transported by the Brugmansia plant, an Indigenous man drifts between vision and reality, carrying the Kamëntšá people’s wisdom where time collapses and the future is felt, not seen.

The film follows the unintended journey of an indigenous man who is suddenly transported from Putumayo, Colombia to the Swiss Alps and nearby urban landscapes after having come in contact with a Brugmansia plant. Caught up somewhere between visions and a quantum jump into a far away place and time, the story of the Borrachero Andaki begins to unravel as the traveler awakens the boundary-breaking powers of a plant that allows connection with vegetal beings and conflates memory, past and present. The film touches on the ethnomedicinal practices of the Kamnësnta people living in the Colombian-Amazon region, who still maintain a close relation to a potent plant from the Burgmansia family. Locally known as Borrachero Andaki, the toxicity of this plant has rendered it as a deadly and divine being at once. Ingesting -or even smelling it- can cause severe hallucinations and temporary loss of memory. Nevertheless, this plant is revered among the shamans for enabling those who take it to anticipate the future, not through visions but through feeling.

Thanks to:

Botanical Garden, University of Zurich
Prof. Dr. Rodrigo Cámara Leret and team: Juan Carlos Copete Maturana, Kimberly Castro, Dr. Ingrid Olivares, Dr. Luiz Leonardo Saldanha.
Quinchoa Juajibioy Family, Collectivo Mingueros: Azucena Olaya, Liliana Olaya, Dora Franco, Juan Alberto Castelblanco, John Alvaro Olaya y Familia, Valeria Castelblanco. Federico Roda, National University Bogota. Colombia. Patrice and Luciano

Borrachero Dreaming by Felipe Castelblanco is realized in the framework of the research project Plants_ Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant (2022 - 2025). A research project by Yvonne Volkart, Felipe Castelblanco, Julia Mensch, and Rasa Smite. Funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and hosted by the Institute Art Gender Nature Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW.

Additional support from:
Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art
Stiftung Niedersachsen
SudKulturFonds

_{Installation views at Museum Sinclair-Haus, Bad Homburg. Photo: Felipe Castelblanco}

Unter Pflanzen, Museum Sinclair-Haus

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Glossary

Borrachero Andaki

From the Solanaceae family, the Borrachero Adaki (or Culebra) is a variety of the Brugmansia plant form the high Andes and humid rainforest of Colombia, thought to be a cultigen because its presence is most often related to human settlements where the plant has been cultivated. In 1942, Richard Evan Schultes encountered this rare variety of the Burgmansia plant. Its leaves narrower, resembling a knife and “the corolla almost divided into separate petals united only towards their bases.”

He named this variety Methysticodendron Amesianum [the Mutant Sleep Tree], or also known as Borrachero Culebra.

Richard Evans Schultes, “A NEW NARCOTIC GENUS FROM THE AMAZON SLOPE OF THE COLOMBIAN ANDES.” Botanical Museum Leaflets, Harvard University 17, no. 1 (1955): 1–11. See term

Buen vivir

Good Living is an old-new paradigm based on the indigenous concept of Sumac Kawsay. It is a concept in collective construction in Latin America that seeks alternatives to the Western idea of development, linking indigenous traditions and worldviews with critical ideas within Western modernity. Buen vivir proposes to abandon the idea of development as unlimited economic growth and to substitute it for a supportive and sustainable economy, displacing the centrality of humans, recognizing the centrality and value of nonhumans, and the rights of Nature.

Mónica Chuji, Grimaldo Rengifo, and Eduardo Gudynas, “Buen Vivir,” in “Pluriverse. A Post-Development Dictionary”, eds. A. Kothari, A. Salleh, A. Escobar, F. Demaria & A. Acosta, (Tulika & Authors Upfront, New Delhi, 2019), 112. See term

Plasticity

Plasticity is an individual plant response to the environmental change as it is called in ecology and evolution studies. According to the view of natural scientists (such as Trewavas), the “intelligent behavior” by plants shows rather during their individual life time scale, and that this process is not an evolution. See term

Resistant weeds

Term given by industrial agriculture to spontaneous vegetation resistant to agrochemicals used in transgenic monocultures. See term

Senti-pensar

Eduardo Galeano once said that our society often separates our soul from the body and mind from heart. To avoid this, Galeano proposed the concept of "senti-pensando" which means feeling-thinking. He learned this wisdom from Colombian fishermen who created the word "sentipensante" to describe language that speaks the truth.

Eduardo Galeano, "The book of embraces,” Trans. Cedric Belfrage, ed. W.W. Norton, (New York, 1991), 221. See term

Weeds

Over 50 years ago, biologist Edwin R. Spencer stated that “any plant is a weed if it insists on growing where the farmer wants another plant to grow. It is a plant that is out of place, according to one person's judgment, but according to the good judgment of nature it is perfectly in its place.”

Edwin Rollin Spencer, in “Malezas comestibles del Cono Sur y otras partes del planeta," E. H. Rapaport, A. Marzocca, S. B. Drausal, (Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria, Universidad Nacional del Comahue, Bariloche, 2009), 3. See term

Borrachero Dreams

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Borrachero Dreams

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