Rewilding culture - ploughing the verb
My work with botanical gardens spans over two decades and continues to unfold. Botanical gardens have always felt part of my being. Growing up near the Botanical Garden of Coimbra, I visited almost every week. As an artist, I filmed there, drew, and photographed. When I was pregnant with my son Mateus, I met a special gardener who worked at the garden, and together we created a short artist film.
Over the years, I have participated in residencies and projects in other gardens — including Kew Gardens in London, the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh, and the Botanical Garden and Herbarium of Porto (June 2024). I will soon begin a new collaboration with Jardim da Estrela (Star Garden) in Lisbon, running from May 2025 to January 2026.
Reflecting on this long relationship, I began to see a thread connecting all these encounters. My work with botanical gardens was always an attempt to seek the wild, to move beyond the boundaries of my own culture. In 2024, I found the title for this evolving body of work: Rewilding Culture – Ploughing the Verb. I realized that the garden itself serves as an integrator of the four kingdoms it holds — mineral, vegetal, animal, and human — each interwoven through artistic and cultural intervention.
Within the garden, the link between human culture and the essence of plants opens a path into the untouched, interior wilderness of perception — a space that exists both within and beyond culture. The word culture comes from the Latin cultivare, meaning “to sow.” This project reinterprets that act — not as the ploughing of land, but as the ploughing of the verb: a creative force that both constructs and dissolves civilizations, and through the garden, seeks harmony with nature, Gaia, and Logos — the spirit and the body.
This work feels both timely and urgent. Nature is transforming, and gardens — by definition — are altered expressions of nature. Humanity, too, is evolving, becoming more receptive to new paradigms amid growing risks and uncertainties about the future. Paraphrasing Carl Jung, the task is not merely to solve problems, for some are unsolvable, but to change our way of seeing. How can we cultivate a higher form of cognition — one rooted in heartfelt connection with Gaia, the Cosmos, and the spirit?
A new, heart-centered cognition is needed. And artists, perhaps more than anyone, have always worked in this way.
The growing archive of Rewilding Culture – Ploughing the Verb now includes a series of films, a living collection of plants that will become an imaginary herbarium — a “spirit collection” — as well as collages and drawings. Together, these works reflect the intersection of non-human realms with human culture and mythology, expanding toward a cosmic and sacred connection.
