GUERRILLA DRUGSTORE
Ongoing project
Credits@Younes Zarhoni
Guerrilla Drugstore is a transdisciplinary — and anti-disciplinary — gesture for those who sow utopia and harvest reality.
It is a street pharmacy dedicated to medicinal plants that have been oppressed, commodified, and deliberately rendered invisible. Emerging from Barcelona through a self-managed network of care and interconnected beings, the project seeks to reclaim ancestral knowledge and collective healing practices.
The pharmacy is conceived as an expanding, rhizomatic network that spreads throughout the city: occupying vacant lots, municipal gardens, and the interstitial spaces of neighbourhoods. It grows through encounters and collaborations with people met in the streets, local communities, and cultural and institutional partners across the city.
Each site within the pharmacy is entrusted with the care of a specific plant or family of plants. The selection emerges through a dialogue between the healing properties of the plant and the particular character, history, and needs of the place where each point takes root.
credits@ Morena Bellini
Tobacco is one of the pharmacy's remedies but, unlike the others, its cultivation is done through a home care network. Each caregiver receives a kit that includes the tobacco plant or its seeds, a letter and a chant to care for the spirit of the plant. The network is conceived as a living organism that continues to expand from year to year. Caregivers can in turn continue to distribute the seeds of the plant, expanding the network of care and helping the tabaco recover its dignity violated by five hundred years of colonialism and vicious capitalism.
Link to listen to Tabac Tarab:
https://guerrilladrugstore.bandcamp.com/releases
Tabac Tarab has been composed and performed by Younes Zarhoni.
Guerrilla Drugstore has been included in the book Artistic Ecologies: New Compasses and Tools edited by Emily Pethick, Pablo Martínez and How & for Whom/WHW What
The project is in progress; it has presented at VI Culture and Citizenship - Ecology Meeting, at the week for Art and Science- Faculty of Fine Art, Madrid, at La Escocesa-Barcelona, and at Tangent Project-Barcelona.