Filipe Castelblanco

Tunda: A Quantic Plant and the Devil's Breath (2025)

This multi-channel video explores the entangled histories of plants and colonial extraction. We see an Indigenous man thrust from the Colombian Amazon to the Swiss Alps, drifting between vision and reality. Landing in a remote museum’s herbarium, he encounters botanical artifacts relating to the Brugmansia plant. This plant is a powerful teacher for Kamnënstá Indigenous healers in Colombia’s Andean-Amazon region. Among these communities, it is believed to possess the ability to cross boundaries of time and space. The work combines science, ethnomedicine, and ecology, encouraging us to question how we see things.

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Realised in the framework of the SNSF research project Plants_Intelligence, IAGN HGK Basel FHNW. Co-commissioned by the Haus für Medienkunst Oldenburg and supported by Stiftung Niedersachsen. Installation Photos: © Haus für Medienkunst 2025 and the artist, 2025