GUERRILLA DRUGSTORE
Ongoing project
Guerrilla Drugstore is a transdisciplinary and anti-disciplinary gesture for those who sow utopia and reap reality.
A street pharmacy of medicinal plants that have been oppressed, capitalised, forgotten and made invisible, and that are being born in Barcelona outwards, through a self-managed network of beings and care.
The construction of the pharmacy is thought as an expanding network that spreads rhizomatically through the city, occupying empty lots, municipal gardens, weaving in the interstices of the neighbourhoods together with the complicity of people met in the street, some communities and institutions of the city.
Each site of the pharmacy has a plant or family of plants to care for. The plant is chosen in dialogue between the healing powers of the plant and the nature of the place where the point arises.
Photos: 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, so that new caregivers may connect with the tobacco and its spirit, restoring the plant’s 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.
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.
More info:
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