Writer and artist Edna Bonhomme chairs a conversation bringing together medical herbalists Sage LaPena and Rasheeqa Ahmad with a guided ancestral meditation by multidisciplinary artist Tabita Rezaire. The talk will focus on land ties, herbalism, and relations to land through ritual and lineage in the context of Indigeneity, as well as diasporic experiences shaped by broader dynamics of displacement and extraction, and ancestry, memory and repair.
Tickets are pay what you can, all profits will be donated to Land In Our Names, a grassroots Black-led collective committed to reparations in Britain by connecting land and climate justice with racial justice.
Programmed by Ignota Books and Auto Italia in cooperation with NTS Radio. The programme has been made possible with the support of Goethe Institut London, Canada House and Art Fund.
Rasheeqa Ahmad (Hedge Herbs) (b. 1979, Wales) is a herbalist of Indian heritage, currently working in her community in Walthamstow in north London. She has been practicing since 2012, offering treatment with herbal medicine and teaching about its many aspects, alongside a broader mix of work whose aim is connecting us as communities with the potential of this knowledge and craft as a way to develop healthier living systems and relationships. Rasheeqa is part of the Community Apothecary in her locality, a CIC that brings community members together around a patchwork of medicinal herb gardens.
Edna Bonhomme (b. USA) is a writer, historian of science, and interdisciplinary artist based in Berlin. As a researcher, Bonhomme’s work interrogates contagion, epidemics, and toxicity through decolonial practices and African diaspora worldmaking. She has written for publications including Africa is a Country, Al Jazeera, Analyse & Kritik, The Baffler, Der Freitag, The Nation, and The New Republic. Bonhomme holds a PhD in History of Science from Princeton University, and a Master’s in Public Health from Columbia University. She has collaborated on and exhibited multimedia projects at Galerie Futura, Berlin (2020); and HAU Berlin (2020).
Sage LaPena is a Wintu (Native American group from the Wintun nation overlapping with California) doctor, herbalist and is certified in traditional fire forest management. For years she has worked to preserve and pass along Native uses of plant medicines from native and introduced plants and other aspects of Traditional Ecological Knowledge connected to plants in North America. She is the Director of Traditional Ecological Knowledge, a member of Deep Medicine Circle (DMC), and works as a medical herbalist at Sacramento Native American Health Center Medical.
Tabita Rezaire (b. 1989, France) is a multidisciplinary artist, doula and kundalini yoga teacher based in French Guyana. In her work she explores the possibilities of decolonial healing through technology. She launched Amakaba, a centre for the “wisdom of the earth, the body and the sky” (2020) and has shown her work internationally at Centre Pompidou, Paris (2023); Serpentine London (2021); Gropius Bau, Berlin (2022); MASP, Sao Paulo (2019); MoMa, New York (2018); Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2018); and ICA London (2017).
