South, London
Nils Alix-Tabeling & Rebecca Jagoe
Florilege
Jupiter WoodsJupiter Woods is pleased to invite you to Florilege, an exhibition by Nils Alix-Tabeling and Rebecca Jagoe staging their ongoing collaboration and mutual research, which proposes occasions of study and practice for thinking about alternative body knowledges in the realms of medicine and herbalism. Considering medieval and early modern understandings of science, property, the body and gender relations, the artists explore their influence and relevance in the present, whilst undertaking a historical retracing of queerness, and the interwoven histories of homosexuality and illness. Drawing from a desire of disrupting a singular canon of knowledge and the authoritative, hierarchical systems of scientific rationalism and medical doctrines, Jagoe and Alix-Tabeling have been focusing on lay knowledge, folklore, and plant knowledge as alternative, collective and community-based forms of reclaiming and reconstituting understanding of the body. Reading and writing as highly codified with gender and sexuality have been important in thinking about individualism, privacy and collectivity, in parallel to embroidery, symbolism and sewing as carriers of meaning. Integrating text and embroidery, Jagoe investigates the relationship between medicine, knowledge and food practices, looking at how incorporation, eating and ingestion, but also patterns of self-starvation, fasting and purging, relate to knowledge-making and identity formation. Alix-Tabeling draws from the traditional knowledge of plants to connect historical conceptions of the body with possible medical progress in our near future; allowing us to broaden our understanding of living materials and our own physical being as transpecie. The body is thus scrutinized between assumptions of its mechanical forms and a more holistic vision of its possibilities: of being connected with multiple spheres of life. The exhibition features works in progress that, assembled by the artists, embody individual and collective processes of making. Aspects of these works have indeed emerged through personal research paths combined with workshops, group activities and conversations: they are carrier of a knowledge that is not fixed, but instead morphs through encounters with the ‘other’. The exhibition is kindly supported by Fluxus Art Projects and Arts Council England.