WOMEN, PLANTS AND HEALING CYCLE
"Every medicine is nature. The clash between the science of traditional peoples and Western science is something that shouldn't exist. We, as beings, inhabit the same Earth. Laboratory science only exists because, before, there was science from the peoples of the Earth, the science of nature. Health and healing lie in the earth, in the food. If we have good soil, we have abundance, we have health and we have life. Territory, good soil, water – these are the conditions for our survival. Ours and of all humanity. When we think of this house – Mother Earth – as a common dwelling place, we need to think of the woods, the forests, the caatinga (semi-arid white forest), the sertão (semi-arid hinterland), as spaces of existence, resistance and healing."
Maria Silvanete Lermen
This time, we were inspired by the knowledge of 13 women from black and indigenous territories in Pernambuco and Paraíba for the second edition of the Women, Plants and Healing study cycle, navigating ancestral knowledge about the earth from the wisdom of those who inhabit and cultivate it.
Each of these voices echoes not just a personal experience, but an accumulation of cultural, regional and family knowledge from each people and territory. Knowledge of immense value, which teaches us ways to health and good life (buen-vivir) based on the richness of each environment and its plants.
ABOUT THE CYCLE
This cycle was the first collective and in-person Selvagem field experience, which took place at Casa de Vivência de Maria Silvanete Lermen, in Serra dos Paus Dóias, in the town of Exu, which is located in Sertão do Araripe, state of Pernambuco. The event was held between 7 and 14 September 2022.
The Women, Plants and Healing II online cycle includes 4 recorded meetings, notebooks and complementary materials, which you can access via the icons on this page.
In the cycle's playlist in the Selvagem platform, we also have some visual recordings of the in-person experience with Silvanete.
Articulation and mediation: Marília Nepomuceno and Ana Paixão de Carvalho
Guest artist: Chonon Bensho
Organised by: Selvagem Ciclo de Estudos
Partnership: Chã – coletiva da terra
study material
PLAYLIST
NOTEBOOKS
