{"data":[{"id":4,"attributes":{"title":"Healing gardens","slug":"healing-gardens","body":"_One summer my friend and artist Aleksejs Malishevs called me from the Hague so we could have a conversation on healing properties of plants, art and femininity. We also admired grandmas and shared our hopes for the future._\n\nAlise\n\nRemember I was telling you about that book on the healing powers of depression?\n\nAleksejs\n\nYes, I've read it\n\nAlise\n\nOh nice! So there was this take about four originally matriarchal and also most effective cures for depression: sexuality, gaze, creation, and soil. When I think of it now, it feels like it is pretty much what you do in your practice and your research of feelings, body, growth, especially the soil part.\n\nTell me about \"_The Garden_\". The first plant I saw was the \"_Angels Wings_\" one. How did you come up with these?\n\n\n![aw.jpg](https://bi.cyclestories.co/uploads/medium_aw_8b336aa1f7.jpg)\n\n\n>_Angels Wings_\n\n\n>\"_Normally, grows near the localities of oppressed environments, as it is attracted by toxic erruptions of ideologies. Especially well adapted to grow near solidified concrete areas. Has a marvelous capacity to digest toxic elements and break them down to essential feelings. Metaphorically speaking, it manifests a will to live and break through obstacles. At first, each new layer of leaves represents the head of a stark and later on opens up in a shape that is reminiscent of a pair of wings\"._\n\nAleksejs\n\nI have always felt a strong interest towards plants, and I really liked the connection between plants and healing. It smelled of magic and sorcery to me, but I didn't really understand how it all works. \n\nI had chamomile, peppermint, and valerian root at home, but it doesn't seem like I'm going deep enough, and I didn't have a herbalist or healer's certificate.\n\nAnd then I've developed a hypothesis that I wanted to test: what if a big part of this magical process of healing depends on the narrative that we put into the process? I've always loved the names of the plants – immortelle, motherwort, slippery elm – they sound so special, and I thought – wow, this is a ready tale of the plant, it tells something and that's enough for me.\n\nThen I had an image of a plant with leaves shaped like bird's wings. I thought: with the root we come from one point, from the earth, the root is not even visible, but we feel it and we are certainly connected with it. The stem thought can grow in any direction, it can even strive to the opposite to explore freedom and will and possibility of expanding boundaries. The question is, will a bird actually grow from this plant, can it be separate from its root? I don't know the answer yet.\n\nAlise\n\nMaybe it will make her a dried bird\n\nAleksejs\n\nYes, a herbarium\n\nAlise\n\nAnd my favourite plant is \"The Old Crying Heart\" . I was amazed how it hit the spot of my being – I am an old crying heart!\n\n![och.jpg](https://bi.cyclestories.co/uploads/medium_och_cf2649788f.jpg)\n\n_An Old Crying Heart_ :\n\n\"_This plant inaugurates nostalgia, vigorously intoxicating one's emotional landscape with a flood of sentimental feelings. Old Crying Heart manifests a moment of deep grief, witnessing poetic evanescence of life. Entropy. This moment brings both appreciation and stagnation. \"It's never gonna be the same as before.\" This simultaneously precious and dangerous plant is extremely rare, officially allowed to be grown in special reservoirs placed under strict supervision. Nowadays, this seemingly poetic kind is used as a secret military weapon\"._\n\nAleksejs\n\nEach plant has its contraindications and side effects. Healing properties can also be poisonous, and I wanted to create the feeling that there is no bad and good plant, no weed or panacea, they all just have different properties.\n\nAlise\n\nAbout weeds, I only recently realised that the plant is just a plant and an animal is just an animal, it's us people who call them weeds or precious species, friends or pests, because this is how our relationship with them developed. Maybe some languages have other words and thus can see the world as less hostile to us. \n\nAnyway, what is healing to you? Why does it interest you and what exactly are you trying to achieve?\n\nAleksejs\n\nI am fascinated by the process of healing – and as it comes from the word \"whole\", it is a process when we can restore ourselves or help others to restore themselves, acquiring full vital force so that we can continue to explore this world.\n\nI also really like to watch how these processes occur in nature – if you damage the bark of a tree, resin will come out, then it will begin to heal and over time it will form a scar. It is very beautiful to me, even though it's traumatic. And you can't really resist the process, you should have the experience, digest it and keep going.\n\nThis path has no specific methods, it is not necessarily herbs or soil, it can be anything. A walk at the right moment, some good interactions with people, or just digging in the sand because you want to, or lighting a candle and watching it.\n\nAnd it all comes down to this theme of cyclicality, observing your own cycles – what is happening to you now.\n\nAlise\n\nTo me the poisonous side of healing is wanting to do it right, up and forward, so that it is a successful healing and I will get something for it, a golden medal.\nThen also If I am so very healed, why would I feel so bad?\n\nIt is very difficult for me to understand and remember for a long time that healing is not about the fact that I will no longer feel bad, that some spectrum of my emotions that we consider unpleasant will no longer bother me.\n\nAleksejs\n\nYes, and it seems to me that if healing is a return to one's neutral, whole state, then maybe at some moments we also need new traumas, to gain this experience and go even further.\n\nThis is where healing manifests itself – entering tense moments we must remember that we will need to find a way back. But having gone through this cycle we are enriched with something.\n\nAlise\n\nVery plant-based way to see the world. I mean, isn't it what plants are doing – experience different cycles of day and year, different weather – snowstorms, winds, and finding a way to recover; and if they are annuals, they manage to sow enough seeds for next ones to grow.\n\nAleksejs\n\nYes. My partner was reading a book about seasons and she read to me that plants have a very cyclical feeling of time, but us people rather perceive time linearly. We live through years and stay alive, while plants sprout in the spring, experience their culmination in the summer, and then wither again, go into hibernation, or maybe even die.\n\nWe are not always aware of our own cyclicality, but it is there – our resources depend on the time of year and how everything changes around us. We, like all living things, animals and plants, have a beginning, middle and end, and something else can happen later.\n\nWhat if we rather look at our linear life through various smaller cycles – something begins to emerge in us, reaches the fruition, maybe in the form of a new developed skill or a surge of strength, and then there's a decline, a kind of death. And we can also plant seeds in advance, for the future.\n\nAlise\n\nI think it's true. Those with menstrual cycles literally die anew every month, and it's so sad that not much is said about it. I really couldn't understand it – how can I feel so good now, and two weeks later it's terrible, and then good again? It's a very exhausting race, if you don't understand that it's natural, realise what's happening in each phase and stay present – okay, now it's bad, but not forever, okay, it's good again, but not forever.\n\nThen there's also depression, which is considered an illness, but I try to look at it as a phase of our life story, too, the dark and sleepy one; and also parting with people, with friends, loved ones – it is a phase of completion of something that once started and was also in a full force at some point.\n\nII\n\nAlise\n\nWhat you do in your artistic practice – weaving, knitting, growing – can be traditionally seen as feminine. What do you think and feel about this? Can you divide artistic practice by gender?\n\nAleksejs\n\nI first came into contact with this issue when working with weaving technology for my diploma thesis. My teacher recommended a feminist book to me, and also pointed out that what I was doing had feminine properties – the very process of interaction with textiles and fabrics historically happened to be considered feminine.\n\nBut then in a book it was explored why it happened like this – quite artificially, actually, in the course of the development of the patriarchal perspective. When the division into male and female duties began, women were forced to work with fabrics, embroider, and eventually this began to be considered a very feminine type of work – but this isn't necessarily true.\n\nI think there is a lot of aggressiveness in working with fabrics, which is classically attributed to male activities – this is not so obvious, but there are needles, cutting, rupturing in this process, it is super transformative, and not at all just peaceful.\n\nAlise\n\nThis is one of the most difficult topics in the world for me, the legitimacy of concepts of femininity and masculinity. They are definitely made-up concepts, most of us can agree that every human has a full range of feelings, and why some of them are attributed to the masculine and some of them to the feminine, no one probably remembers.\n\nOne of my teachers once said – _how can you have a masculine quality if you consider yourself a woman? If you are a woman and this is your quality, it is a woman's quality._ Your female rage, your female desire to smash everything, you know.\n\nWhat about you, do you believe in these concepts, are they limiting or empowering you?\n\nAleksejs\n\nI have become interested in weaving, knitting, and braiding not because they are for women, but because of the properties they have – a thread is long and twisting, it creates connections, it tells a story, but can also be cut; and when you weave, new layers grow, build up, multiply – as if a plant is growing.\n\nFrom my earlier years I can remember that I was more shy in interaction with knitting and embroidery, mostly because I thought it might seem strange in the society, a boy who embroiders, although to me it was always incredibly inspiring.\n\nAnd as to the concept of masculine and feminine – I feel closer to the concept of yin and yang, the aggressive and the pacifying element, which are still one whole and need each other. This formula is related to any processes and it does not matter what gender someone is.\n\nAlise\n\nWhat influenced your worldview and interests?\n\nAleksejs\n\nThe first thing that comes to mind is that when I was a child, our family had a vegetable garden, we were growing things there and I really liked being a part of it. It became very important for me, being there and observing these processes, even though I was little and didn't participate much, but I was present.\n\nAnd another thing, very symbolic to me, also from childhood – when my grandmother and I were taking trains, she loved to buy all sorts of magazines at the station to read on the road.\n\nThere were all sorts of things like \"_Home doctor_\", \"_The herbalist_\", and there were often stories about plants and their properties that she read to me.\n\nI was terribly interested to learn that dandelions can be eaten, that you can make a salad from them that has so many properties that it will almost make you immortal, that was my perception.\n\nAlise\n\nAhh, grandmothers are great guides, whether you really have one or it is a grandmother figure.. I have one more question for you. What kind of world would you like to live in ten years, if it could be anything?\n\nAleksejs\n\nAs a beginning artist with all my ambitions I often want to end up somewhere, and often at the moment of impatience I want it right now, which can lead to disappointment that I am not there yet..\n\nI would really like to settle in a state where I am good at the moment as it is, where I can observe my processes better, be more in sync with them and feel comfortable.\nThat's where I would like to be in ten years, and I probably won't be able to move far away from the topic of gardening, to be in this personal garden, to look at what is growing there and to give it time. This is the biggest challenge for me at the moment.\n\nAlise\n\nYes, for me it is also very important to remember that I can't simply end up at point B. And even if I could, it would not have much value. Here I am sitting with everything around me being just as I wanted it, a beautiful world, and so what?\n\nAleksejs\n\nYes. I think it is difficult to find ourselves in this beautiful world without internal preparation. I imagine finding myself in this ideal world with exactly the same understanding of this world as I have now and I don't really see the point in it.\n\n꩜\n\n\n\n\nBooks mentioned in this conversation:\n\n- \"Tales of Reversible Death: Depression as a Healing Force\" by Simone Matzliach-Chanoch \n- \"Nagori\" by Ryoko Sekiguchi \n- \"The subversive stitch\" by Rozsika Parke \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n","color":"#346c34","subtitle":"a talk with artist Aleksejs Malishevs","createdAt":"2024-09-08T15:01:38.125Z","updatedAt":"2025-05-09T08:55:00.437Z","publishedAt":"2024-09-15T10:53:16.089Z","author":"Alise Īlena","meta_description":null,"rank":null,"additional_components":[],"image":{"data":{"id":80,"attributes":{"name":"здфтее.jpg","alternativeText":null,"caption":"\"Angels Wings\", art by Aleksejs Malishevs","width":962,"height":950,"formats":{"small":{"ext":".jpg","url":"/uploads/small_zdftee_fabcafee62.jpg","hash":"small_zdftee_fabcafee62","mime":"image/jpeg","name":"small_здфтее.jpg","path":null,"size":76.23,"width":500,"height":494,"sizeInBytes":76232},"medium":{"ext":".jpg","url":"/uploads/medium_zdftee_fabcafee62.jpg","hash":"medium_zdftee_fabcafee62","mime":"image/jpeg","name":"medium_здфтее.jpg","path":null,"size":176.78,"width":750,"height":741,"sizeInBytes":176775},"thumbnail":{"ext":".jpg","url":"/uploads/thumbnail_zdftee_fabcafee62.jpg","hash":"thumbnail_zdftee_fabcafee62","mime":"image/jpeg","name":"thumbnail_здфтее.jpg","path":null,"size":8.64,"width":158,"height":156,"sizeInBytes":8644}},"hash":"zdftee_fabcafee62","ext":".jpg","mime":"image/jpeg","size":319.26,"url":"/uploads/zdftee_fabcafee62.jpg","previewUrl":null,"provider":"local","provider_metadata":null,"createdAt":"2024-10-16T12:23:41.518Z","updatedAt":"2025-01-24T07:34:36.740Z"}}}}}],"meta":{"pagination":{"page":1,"pageSize":25,"pageCount":1,"total":1}}}

Healing gardens a talk with artist Aleksejs Malishevs