Milena Bonilla | Notes on Soils, Light and Gravity

A new drawing installation from the Sketching for Gardening series marks an incarnation of long-standing plant root work in historically relevant sites across the world. Following root work in cities like Bogotá, Berlin, and Warsaw, Bonilla is currently focusing on Amsterdam, where she is researching several places of human and non-human seclusion in connection to histories of confinement, colonialism, and capitalism.

Letter to a Roosting Tree conjures the revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, a figure that has become a recurrent subject in Bonilla’s practice. The work consists of a hand painted text on cotton banner which was displayed on a horse-chestnut tree at the park in front of the former hospital, CCA Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, a photograph of the intervention, and a printed letter addressed to Sophie Liebknecht by Rosa Luxemburg from prison in Wrocław in 1917. The letter makes an account of a flock of crows passing and chatting among themselves up in the sky, above the prison yard where Rosa was among other prisoners; she used the onomatopoeia "Kau-Kau" for depicting the sound of the crows.

Lullabies (2026), a series of prints from the Epistemic Barricades series– sculptural works consisting of stone and rock fragments that the artist has grabbed from historically charged sites and wrapped in leaves and flowers of Master Plants*-further reinforce their power as their alkaloids are invoked in close association to the historical event. The fragments are mineral testimonies of Capitalism’s exertion of violence across the world. The Monumento a los Héroes in Bogotá, the Palácio de Cristal in Porto, or Wall Street in New York City are a few examples. In this new iteration of the series, Bonilla has made photographic inkjet prints of a selection of sculptures and written an indication of the fragments’ origin and a newly coined term that features selected minerals and alkaloids present in both the rocks and the plants respectively, invoking the presence of a symbiont between vegetal and mineral realms.

In the backspace, the three chapters of the video project I Am Life and Life is Beautiful (2022 - 2023) are presented together in one channel. Bonilla visited three memorials to Rosa Luxemburg in Berlin with the aim of finding some of the plants depicted in the notebooks that compose her botanical collection. Bonilla converses with herbalist and dancer Shelley Etkin about the plants’ characteristics, rubrics, healing capacities, and symbolic powers as understood from different cultures. The years during which the plants in Rosa Luxemburg’s herbarium were collected mark historical events via a set of texts in the video that highlight aspects of Luxemburg’s life, context, and her positioning as a political dissenter.