reWilding Nature – my response to the spotted thick-knee

By: Julia Raynham

This work of art proposes a community-led and intellectually considered counter-strategy to the state’s authoritarian response towards the Covid-19 pandemic. It configures a strategy to recover medicine sovereignty in our city – in particular the establishment of an African Medicine Garden & Clinic on neglected municipal land (zoned Community Open Space by the City), in Woodstock. The artist is part of The People’s Coalition working group on Public Health -- iKhwelo Healer’s Collective. Following the philosophies of Ecological & Indigenous Medicine and through artistic agency, she engages in research as practice, gives form to community solidarity, sets up discursive platforms which make visible decolonial subjectivities relating to land, medicine, physical and mental health, and begins to develop design sketches and an architectural brief which will inform the establishment of the African Medicine Garden & Clinic.