GUERRILLA DRUGSTORE
Ongoing project
Credits@Younes Zarhoni
Guerrilla Drugstore is a transdisciplinary—and anti-disciplinary—gesture for those who sow utopia and harvest reality.
A street pharmacy dedicated to medicinal plants that have been oppressed, monopolized, 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 health practices.
The pharmacy is conceived as an expanding, rhizomatic structure 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 plant family. The selection emerges through a dialogue between the healing properties of the plant, the community involved, and the place where each site takes root.
The project is currently underway. Among the initiatives developed so far are: a garden dedicated to menopause, created in collaboration with a group of elderly weavers (CA2M Museum, Madrid); a project carried out with children from Lope de Vega School in Madrid, dedicated to plants that support the treatment of breast and lung cancer; a cultivation site at Jardin Ambulant (MACBA Museum, Barcelona), dedicated to the wellbeing of women involved in prostitution and affected by substance use; and a series of "hacker gardening" interventions in Barcelona's Raval neighbourhood, home to many migrant communities, dedicated to Artemisia annua—a plant known for its immune-supporting properties and its potent antimalarial compounds. Despite its recognised medicinal potential, the cultivation and use of Artemisia annua is restricted or prohibited in several countries, including The Gambia, where malaria remains highly prevalent.
Tobacco is one of the remedies offered by the pharmacy. Unlike the others, however, it is cultivated through a home-based care network. Each caregiver receives a kit containing a tobacco plant and seeds, a letter, and a chant to care for the spirit of the plant, which is regarded as sacred in many Indigenous traditions.
The network is conceived as a living organism that continues to expand year after year. Each caregiver is encouraged to share the seeds with others, allowing the network to grow while helping tobacco reclaim the dignity stripped from it through five centuries of colonialism and capitalism.
Link to listen to Tabac Tarab:
https://guerrilladrugstore.bandcamp.com/releases
Tabac Tarab has been composed and performed by Younes Zarhoni.
credits@ Morena Bellini
Guerrilla Drugstore has also been included in the book Artistic Ecologies: New Compasses and Tools edited by Emily Pethick, Pablo Martínez and How & for Whom/WHW What.
