La Foresta Senza Parole – mostra di Lucia Veronesi al Centro Hannah Ryggen

Women have known the uses of herbs for medical purposes since ancient times, but their knowledge of plants has not been properly recognised in the history of the botanical sciences. While scientific knowledge was reserved for men until the Middle Ages, new possibilities opened for women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: for the first time, they could access education and, in rare cases, travel to train themselves. In the nineteenth century, the first manuals for aspiring      travelling researchers began to circulate, with instructions on the collection of archaeological finds, on scientific observation, and on the cataloguing of populations, animals, and plants. Some women travelled across Europe, Asia, and Africa for these purposes, but their scripts and memoirs were rarely mentioned in the bibliographies of travellers of those times. Their contributions to scientific knowledge were removed.

Arguably, a comparable eradication is happening in the botanical field today, in reference to indigenous populations’ knowledge of medicinal plants. Indigenous peoples have traditionally passed on their knowledge of medicinal plants orally, and the plants’ names and pharmaceutical capacities are closely related to their specific languages. A study from the University of Zurich concludes that 30% of indigenous languages will disappear by the end of our century.* When the indigenous languages disappear, the knowledge of plants and their functions will disappear with them. In that sense, language loss may be as critical to the extinction of medicinal knowledge as biodiversity loss.

Italian artist Lucia Veronesi’s project La desinenza estinta (The Extinct Desinence) was born as a broad reflection on the relationship between the history of science in its female declinations, the field of botany, the extinction of languages, and their socio-political implications. The project has developed through a research phase, in which the artist visited the British Library, Wellcome Collection Library, Kew Gardens Library and Chelsea Physic Garden in London; The National Museum of Decorative Arts and Design in Trondheim and the Hannah Ryggen Centre in Ørlandet; the Botanical Garden and the Herbarium at the University of Zurich, where Veronesi collaborated with Professor of biology Rodrigo Cámara-Leret and ecology Professor Jordi Bascompte. The result of the project is a publication, textile works, a video, and collages, which will be exhibited in four different solo exhibitions during 2024, at MOCA, London, the Hannah Ryggen Centre at Brekstad, Ørlandet, outside Trondheim, Ca’Pesaro, Venice, and KORA, Puglia.

The exhibition The wordless forest, the part of the project La desinenza estinta (The Extinct Desinence) presented at the Hannah Ryggen Centre in May, will present a monumental digital jacquard tapestry, a stop motion video, and a selection of collages – works that in a poetic way revolve around the socio-political aspects that stand at the core of this project – seeking to establish a link with Hannah Ryggen as a female artist with deep knowledge about the characteristics and capacities of plants, and with her idea of textile as a political medium. On view at the Hannah Ryggen centre is also objects that belonged to Ryggen – like her loom and the pot used for dyeing – and her tapestry Vår. Ørland (1956).

* R. Cámara-Leret and J. Bascompte, “Language extinction triggers the loss of unique medicinal knowledge”, PNAS 118/24 (June 2021), ed. B. L. Turner.