Art Residency at Monterey Museum of Art La Mirada

Botanica “La Mirada”, a research based project developed during my art residency at the Monterey Museum of Art La Mirada, combines traditional herbalism, social critique and personal cartography.

Inspired in the syncretic folk medicine and spiritual traditions of Spanish and Indian cultures, this art project offers an alternative way of looking at issues of colonization, power dynamics and cultural assimilation. 

Having the city of Monterey as the background, I embarked on a pilgrimage to map gardens from the Spanish and Mexican period, incorporating native, invasive and naturalized plants into herbal remedies that will be shared with the public.

This project is informed not only by historic data, but it also incorporates myths and legends that shaped the history of Monterey, from its past forms of colonialism to the present ones.
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DISCLAIMER: The medicines in this project are all made with natural ingredients grown in Monterey, California. They carry all the healing properties attributed by ancestral knowledge. However, they don’t intend to offer any solution to current health care problems but a playful 
way to reclaim herbalism as a form of institutional critique and resistance towards our capitalistic culture.