“Sacred
plant mandala” by Stuart Grigg
Hello
all,
After
the past weekend of an unbearable heat wave, no electricity, and no AC, I now
have a brand new AC unit installed, and the heat toned down from 110F to the 85F.
Life’s easy!
The
heat liquefied both my body and brain cells, and my project idea was at a
standstill. I finally had a breakthrough in the middle of last week, after a
phone call that confirmed my vision coincides with the intentions of Paulo Roberto Silva e Souza who inspired my project in
the first place.
Let
me briefly recap what my project is all about:
I
conceived of it as a series of VR
experiences and an online platform with a working title “Reconnect! The Amazon
Medicine Garden.” In most general terms, it aims to preserve the living
environment – the rainforest – and the culture of indigenous Yawanawá people
from the Brazilian Amazon. It was inspired by my encounter with Paulo Roberto Silva e Souza presenting
his research on Yawanawá’s medicinal plants at Google’s “TechTalk.”
The series of
interactive VR experiences will take user on a subjective journey to discover
the value of the Amazon rainforest, its plants, and their medicinal properties.
The online platform will
be a place where Yawanawá’s upload content about their daily life, environment,
and its politics. Ultimately, this platform provides the Amazonian tribes with
a means to productively connect and dialogue with both one another and globally,
while also offering compelling VR experiences to introduce individual users all
over the globe to Yawanawá’s perspectives.
Paulo Roberto Silva e Souza and his son Jordão are both assisting the tribe’s efforts to preserve
the rainforest that their entire existence and culture depend on. One of their
efforts consists of building an indigenous
school with an associated medicine garden where the young members of the tribe
are taught traditional knowledge about medicinal plants. This school also includes a jungle clinic.
My project, “Reconnect! The Amazon Medicine Garden,” supports the idea of the
preservation of cultural inheritance and knowledge through nature. That is, the
medicinal plants that are gathered from the rainforest and re-planted in the
garden – as a part of the indigenous school – represent the repositories of Yawanawá’s
knowledge and healing practices. They experience these plants as
imbued with knowledge, which our Western cultures see as
relegated to the linguistic and numeric codes, processed primarily by the intellect. In many ways, focusing on intellect and symbolic codes dissociates us not only form “Nature” at large, but also from our own “nature” – our
embodied Self.
So, in many ways, the driving force
behind my project is to create an experience that enables anyone to reconnect
with our “Natural” embodied self through the Yawanawá way of perceiving this
interrelatedness. According to Yawanawá, this “Natural” embodied self is capable of clarity and
self-healing that often escapes our habitual “ways of seeing.”
For my prototype, I decided to go with
a “slice” of the experience, which is gong to be an encounter with one of the
medical plants and its spirit. A guide speaking in a native tongue will
introduce the plant. (Incidentally, a friend of mine who invited me to Pablo’s
“TechTalk,” told me that Pablo saw this in the exact same way, although we
never spoke about this directly!)
The encounter with the plant will be
both informative and magical:
It will be informative, because I want
to represent the chemical structures of the plant and the physics of their movement
on the cellular and atomic levels as they interact with the user’s embodiment (on
the cellular level).
The encounter will be magical because I
want this interaction, visualizing our interrelatedness with the plants and
everything around us, to give each user a glimpse of the alternative view on
natural environment and our place in it. And, of course, it will look
beautiful.
This wasn’t short, but it was sweet for
me to regain my direction. Thank you for reading! Any feedback and suggestions
will be greatly appreciated! Maja
Imagining the visuals:
Note: These images are not my creations! I have borrowed them from the www.
1. The movement of atoms in the plant
and its interaction with our embodiment on the cellular level.
2. The “deep” structures of plants –
not exactly atoms and chemical elements, but an approximation of journeying
“into” the plant.
3. Opening
the doors of perception to let the plant spirit emerge into plain view.
