Confinement, and as through talking confined plants, we can generate a militancy action, which is the base and in gemini in the same confined space, as small cracks of resistance.

So much time locked within walls opens us to thought, in the face of the inevitable uncertainty of being, the fragility of bodies or the evidence of our weakness. The possible answer, and one that many people have turned to, has been to put plants on balconies, windows, private gardens - or even indoor plants - and take care of them.

But at the same time it refers us to the confinement of Rosa Luxemburg, the activist who went through the prisons of Berlin, Wronke and Wroclaw, St Lazare in Paris, Leipzig ... To be militant, rebellious, nonconformist, in front of a system always banished to the different. States have always had mechanisms for eliminating the unwanted or the uncomfortable, and have often made use of confinements and separatisms as mechanisms of social, racial, sexual exclusion. From the hunting of witches, lizards, to the insane asylums of the 19th century, the prisons along the historical processes, the hygienic currents, or the law of vagrants and thugs of 1933, later updated by the Franco regime.

Germinated militancy talks about all this, the confinement created by the state of alarm, and the uses or abuses that may arise from these actions. In a state of alarm, we should not be surprised that resistance arises. The term resistance - resistance - would be spread during World War II, to designate a type of citizens, who spontaneously, disorganized, and outside the official army fought to stop the fascist advance.

And, how Rosa Luxemburg's stay in these prisons would serve as inspiration for her practice of botany. From political militancy to botanical militancy. From one form of resistance to another. Plants are not sensitive forms, stereotypes, but can be powerful tools of militancy. His seventeen herbarium notebooks made between 1913 and 1918 in the prisons of Berlin, Wronke and Wroclaw, or the letters sent to Sophie Liebknecht where references to plants are a constant, are known worldwide. Working with these and from their confinement, would be like an act of liberation.

The last plant of the herbarium in number XVII dates from the 15 of October of 1918, and was a candlestick, Verbascum lychnitis. Rosa Luxemburg is murdered exactly three months later. The reality of Luxembourg allows us to see in short the fine line that separates botany from politics and militant struggle.

 

 

 

 

LIVING PLANTS PRESENT IN THE PIECE:

Chandelier ( Verbascum thapsus ), red clover ( Trifolium hirtum ), false nettle ( Lamium maculatum ), dandelion ( Taraxacum officinale ), orchid ( Phalaenopsis mix. Asian Coral ), pansies ( Viola × wittrockiana ), leprosy grass ( Veronica officinalis ), thuja ( Thuja occidentalis ), geranium ( Pelargonium Graziosa Piccola ), petunia Surfina ( Petunia × atkinsiana Surfinia Group ), plantago coronopus , mallow ( malva silvestris ), violet -confined from my mother's yard- ( Viola odorata ), tea board, fake tea, new Spain tea, leprosy herb - considered an exotic species with invasive potential - (Chenopodium ambrosioides).