Ekkergemstraat 54-56 (12/8/2021)
Glaskruid. We hebben te maken met Groot Glaskruid (Parietaria officinalis) en Klein Glaskruid (Parietaria judaica). Het verschil tussen beide bestaat uit de holle stengel bij het Groot Glaskruid. Moelijk uit elkaar te halen. Ik lees: als ze beiden voorkomen, “gaat Klein Glaskruid qua vorm én grootte lijken op Groot glaskruid”
Klein glaskruid bloeit van Mei tot en met Oktober. Glaskruid behoort tot de familie van de Brandnetels (Urticaceae) en bloeit amper. Glaskruid verwijst naar het gebruik van het blad als poetsmiddel voor glas. De stengelbladeren zijn met korte haren bezet die als een soort schuursponsje werken om (kristallen) glazen – ook de binnenkant van flessen of flacons - mee te poetsen. In tegenstelling tot de netels prikken ze niet.
Het gaat om een mediterane plant die door de klimaatsverandering steeds meer verschijnt in onze steden.
We vinden Klein Glaskruid terug in steden tussen de stenen waar de Engelse (Pellitory-of-the-wall), Duitse (Mauer-Glaskraut) en Spaanse naam (Hierba del muro) naar verwijzen.
Author: Catriona Gallagher
99 pages, 2018.
Catriona Gallagher’s practice is a daily rhythm of observing the physical environment around her. Her work plays with scale in mapping, recording and tracing, in turn producing drawings, writings, video and sculptural interventions. Studying plants and their relationship to architecture is a recurring tool in her work.
The Perdikaki plant, or Pellitory of the Wall, is generally perceived as a weed and is found growing in the cracks of the city. Perdikaki grows prolifically and yet is overlooked. It can be found on every street, but the majority of the city’s inhabitants are unaware of its existence. It is dependent on architecture, following the lines of streets and buildings and thriving where there is no one to manage it.
https://www.catrionargallagher.com/8743384-pellitory-of-the-wall
Editing: Catriona Gallagher and Nikoleta Leousi
Musical composition and sound design: Alyssa Moxley
Featuring:
Maroula Antoniadou - The Kyria
Catriona Gallagher - The Narrator
John Bicknell - The Collector
A peripatetic narrative following the growth of the prolific yet overlooked weed perdikaki (περδικἀκι, pellitory-of-the-wall) through the urban landscape of Athens, Greece. As three characters search for meaning in the unassuming plant, their methods and objectives entangle. The Narrator’s search for the elderly woman first seen picking the plant, the Kyria, leads us through the empty and abandoned places of the city. As observations and findings accumulate, a shadow researcher, The Collector, emerges and the focus blurs: are we in pursuit of the elderly woman’s wisdom, or The Collector’s? and other than the symbolic plant do the other figures exist at all?
World Premiere - 58th Ann Arbor Film Festival, March 2020
Russian Premiere - New Holland Island Film Festival, August 2020 (Special Mention - Short Film Competition)
THE HEALING PLANT: ‘THE COLLECTOR’S ARCHIVE’ by CATRIONA GALLAGHER
https://theathensproject.wordpress.com/2016/04/27/the-healing-plant-the-collectors-archive-by-catriona-gallagher/
Catriona Callagher is a British artist that moved to Athens two years ago, initially for a residency at Snehta Residency in Kypseli in 2014 and then she decided to stay, working in Greece both as an artist and as a curator. Her research on Athens started during the initial period spent in the city, studying the cracks in a wooden floor of the apartment she was living in when she mapped the story of this surface in its cracks, deformations, irregularities, due by the passage of time and previous uses. After that she decided to extend the field of her research towards the open spaces of some neighborhoods of the city center of Athens, mainly Kypseli, where she started to record urban voids and the places where wild plants sprout. The body of work produced for this investigation shows a particular attention for abandoned buildings and ruins, empty plots, and how nature informally appropriates the city, its soil and it constructions. The artist’s interest on nature follows an interesting geographical displacement where nature become universal. The first contact happened during a short stay in Italy at the small village of Toffia in the Sabine Mountains in the Center of Italy, where during spring nature revealed itself by sprouting everywhere. A second encounter with nature happened at the Torino Porta Nuova train station, when going out from the wagon like a casual passenger, Catriona bumped into the plants that were invading the wall just in front of her. Strolling in Athens, Catriona has discovered the wild plants that invade walls, houses, pavements, joints and cracks, and she constantly records and maps these casual encounters.
Her recent exhibition The Collector’s Archive took place at Praxitelous 33, Athens, between January 15th and February 4h 2016. The exhibition tells the story of the parietaria (parietaria judaica; περδικάκι in greek, pellitory-of-the-wall in english), the wild plant that grows almost everywhere in the city. It grows wild and in harsh conditions, outside and free, in the cracks of the pavements, close to plumbing tubes where water flows, or at the edge of abandoned plots. It is less damaging then figs or capers, but is it always present. Its harsh nature makes the parietaria a pioneer, the fist to invade places that are not yet colonized colonized: it destroys the barriers between the inside and the outside, enhancing the continuity between the built and the unbuilt. The parietaria enhances the process of ruination of a building bringing it back to its original state of nature, evoking the horizontal continuity of the ground in its original natural state. There is a legend that make the parietaria a mythical presence. Accordingly to Pliny’s Natural History, a slate was falling down on the head of Pericles during the construction of the Acropolis and Athena dreamed that the parietaria would heal his wound. The ancient past emerged when Catriona firstly discovered the plant among the ruins of the Roman Agora, and suddenly in many archaeological sites around Athens. The parietaria is thus a mythical and free soul with the power to heal the city in ruins.
The Collector is Catriona’s alter ego, a fictional character that walks with curiosity in the city looking for the parietaria. After the strolls,the Collector had spent some time in a doma (δόμα), an illegal room built on the roof of a polykatoikia, reachable only from the apartment at the last floor and with a privilege access to the roof. Here the Collector though, made notes, stared at the city from distance. The Collector thus has a dual life: the physical contact with the material city in the act of picking up plans from the ground, collecting fragments and pieces, and the aesthetic contemplation from a place to observe reality, a sort of withdrawal for a voluntary isolation to understand and elaborate the city from above, like Aristide Antona’s Zizek house.
“The Collector is a semi-fictional character who has been researching the plant perdikaki and its growth in the city of Athens for the last two years. His compulsion to record how and where the plant grows seems to stem from his fascination with how abundantly but almost invisibly it exists. The Collector observes the instances and variability of the plant’s occurrence in the city through drawings, notes, pressed and live specimens. He emerges almost as an alter-ego whom the artist becomes, recently
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