BotanicalMind .Online
The Botanical Mind: Art, Mysticism and The Cosmic Tree
Drawing on indigenous traditions from the Amazon rainforest; alternative perspectives on Western scientific rationalism; and new thinking around plant intelligence, philosophy and cultural theory, The Botanical Mind Online investigates the significance of the plant kingdom to human life, consciousness and spirituality across cultures and through time. It positions the plant as both a universal symbol found in almost every civilisation and religion across the globe, and the most fundamental but misunderstood form of life on our planet.
This new online project brings together digital commissions, podcasts, films, texts, images and audio in an expanding archive that will be updated and added to regularly over the coming weeks.
Delfina MuN
Delfina Mun is an indigenist, visual artist and musician from Argentina. Using voice and charango, her acoustic performances embrace songs from the indigenous peoples of Abya Yala (South America), as well as her own compositions. She is guided by her spiritual studies in the Amazon Rainforest, with sound and vision deeply engrained in a harmonious and integrated connection to nature.
Nii Txana (Singers of the Forest) - is inspired by the plants and animals from the jungle and is about the birth of song - it tells a story of birds bringing melody to the world. The song is a ‘live prayer’ – a sacred chant usually performed in ceremonies. The musical melody is a way of connecting with a primal essence from the natural world. The recording was made in her home on an island in Argentina where she lives surrounded by birds and other animals. Wiwi is also known as The Sacred Song of the Wind, a song sung by women from the Mapuche indigenous nation that live in Argentina and Chile. It evokes the essence of the wind and connects with the four directions.
See the complete collaboration with Camden Arts Centre:
https://www.botanicalmind.online/chapter-indigenous-cosmologies
La Madre, 2020
“One of the gifts received in this moment of silence in this enchanted forest is this song. When the world entered this crisis I found myself going back to an eternal and ancestral place... Mother Earth. Always coming back to the arms of the great mother... whenever there is confusion or darkness, going back to this sacred nature and all the answers come, bringing light. Walking through life as a traveller... already a decade of seeking through the four corners of the world and always coming back to the same place: to finding the whole universe in the flight of a bird, the sound of a cricket, the flow of a river. In that nature I feel complete, and this song speaks of the many faces and identities a woman can have, and of so many women from different cultures I have met. Because the energy of the of the mother can take many shapes, but its essence is one.”
Delfina Mun