Curing: Salt, Textile, Text

This project is the result of a one month residency at the Karmelitinnen-Kloster garden in Gmunden, a space that bears witness to a long tradition of healing practices. Eighteen months after the last nuns left the kloster, the garden has an unknown future.  Through experiments with natural dyeing and recipe-writing, we explore ideas of preservation and transformation, reconsidering fragments of the past, forgotten rituals and processes of making to invite multi-sensory responses to the garden and the ways of knowing and doing it embodies. 

The English word ‘curing’ means healing someone or something, but is also used to describe traditional processes of preservation, such as salting food. In this double sense, ‘curing’ became an idea for thinking about the garden, its history and contemporary relevance. What would happen if we worked with organic processes of change (fading, fermenting, decay, corrosion), paid attention to plants, or acknowledged that our health is entangled with that of the planet? 

This artist residency is part of European Capital of Culture, 2024