THE AIKAS HERBARIUM

The Aikas Herbarium is an ecological project that reimagines the traditional herbarium and the place of plants within literature. Departing from an ethical recollection of plant specimens, the Aikas Herbarium subverts the cultural inscription of plants through the writing of phytographias (Patricia Vieira, 2005), a mode of literature that seeks to represent the worldview of plants offering a non-hierarchical perspective of the world. Traditional herbaria have always been accompanied by journals that gather details and observations about the plant recollection, contributing to an instrumental relationship with the vegetal world historically related to colonial and extractivist practices. The Aikas Herbarium subverts this tradition by proposing being-in-nature as an open practice, where the challenge of the poet is capturing reciprocal and situated relationships between plants and other living beings.