Plants as Artifacts: Living Practices of Sugar and Coffee
Herban Cura with Tigist Kelkay and Jess Turner
Saturday, May 14, 12–3:30 pm
Use code CURA for complimentary admission

Connect with the plant behind the commodity! Join New York-based education platform and artist collective Herban Cura for knowledge-shares about sugar and coffee—active matter often consumed as fuel for productivity. As two of the most globally commodified plants, sugar and coffee have been taken out of their original ecologies, often in ways that perpetuate violence against the plants as well as their human stewards, the many peoples who have been impacted by colonization across the globe. Even as colonial violence persists, many living practices that depend on plant-people relations continue to exist and evolve.

In one knowledge-share, you can explore coffee through a traditional roasting and sipping ceremony from the Ethiopian tradition offered by Tigist Kelkay. In the other, Jess Turner will guide you through pressing fresh sugar cane to taste on site while looking at different ways in which this plant has been refined and commodified.

Herban Cura, curated by Antonia Estela Pérez, Sebastián Pérez, and Em McCann Zauder, seeks to create access to ancestral and plant wisdom—both through the rematriation of Indigenous life-ways and through remembrance and reclamation of how to live in solidarity with the earth and with our human and more-than-human kin.