Online Manifesto and Protest against Police Violence in Colombia by Nomadic Seeds & Mesa Usmeka Bogota

Online registration via post@romatrial.org

We invite you to be part of our online manifesto and protest performance on the 29th of May. We will listen to and share voices of protesters and activists in Colombia and a manifesto of healing plants for resistance. In memory of 41 killed protesters and 1500 protesting victims of police violence we will then all together plant in an online ritual our plants of resistance and memory.

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(Full detail below)

PLANTING RESISTANCE is a collaboration between NOMADIC SEEDS and the MESA USMEKA in Bogota, Colombia and part of the ROMA-BIENNALE 2021. With healing plants that our ancestors used to heal when we were children, today we try to heal the pain and the wounds that violence has inflicted on us. We want to share with all of you a manifesto we built with the knowledge about these plants. We believe that amidst all of this, tenderness, compassion and taking care for each other can always be remedies for resistance. NOMADIC SEEDS is a platform for dialogue and exchange about healing plants and a place for the seeds of friendships to grow. It was founded by the artists Delaine le Bas and Mara Lea Hohn as a reaction to CoViD-19 with an urgency to invent strategies of self-care and create accesses to natural and non-industrial remedies independently from pharma-industries or governments for everybody. https://instagram.com/nomadic.seeds

USMEKA is a communitarian collective based in Usme at Bogota‘s southeast. There it is working with rural, farmers and indigenous communities. It believes heritage and memory have key roles in territorial, social and cultural planning and most of all, that they are keys in the way we connect with each other and built our territories. Their work has been focussing on El Carmen, one of the oldest archaelogical and indigenous findings localized in Bogotá.

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IN DETAIL
(90 minutes ; Live-Stream on Zoom and roma-biennale.com)

1) VOICES
Protesters and activists will speak openly about the current situation and express their views and perspectives.

2) MANIFESTO *PLANTS OF PROTEST*
USMEKA will present a manifesto, introducing healing plants, plants of protest and resistance that are supporting immunity in times of violence and oppression.

3) SILENT PROTEST PERFORMANCE
We will then perform online a silent protest performance. Please prepare for that a plant or seed, a pot and some soil. We will name the names of the 41 protesters that were killed in the last weeks in Colombia. In their names we will then plant our plants of choice in a digital community ritual. We invite you and your friends and family to take part in this.//Please prepare a plant or seed, a pot and some soil that you can plant from wherever you are (e.g. your kitchen, your balcony, etc.). The plant you plant will create a memory, will respond with life, care and hope and is by that an act of resistance against cruelty and death. Please encourage as much people as you can, to join. The more we are the stronger the power of our performance can be.