II

Over the past decade, artist Lucila Gradín (Bariloche, 1981) has collaborated with a team of homeopaths, healers, and philosophers to recover knowledge that honors plants as teachers and guides. A turning point in her work was discovering that every medicinal plant is also a dye plant, leading her to understand the color emanating from them as a healing ripple effect. This idea is not new: in many cultures, the color plants produce when dyeing various textile surfaces is perceived as an extension of their healing properties, potentially transferable to the people who wear them³. However, Lucila is interested in exploring a much broader notion of well-being, which includes reflecting on how we can develop ethical practices with plant life that take root and weave networks of care across the Earth. Since then, the artist has been dedicated to creating a herbarium of native, medicinal, and dye plants, whose colors she perceives as translations of the relationships defining local ecosystems: the seasons, soil quality, surrounding biodiversity, access to water, sunlight, among others.

The methodology developed by Lucila challenges traditional narratives of Western painting, a discipline in which she originally trained and where plant life has usually been a secondary or marginal object of representation. In contrast, the artist activates the dye metabolism of plants, allowing them to “paint.” The alchemy of colors happens in her workshop, a space that—with its pots, natural fibers, and, of course, plants—resembles a kitchen where life is cooked rather than a laboratory. Each species has its particular way of releasing color; for some, the bark must be used, for others the leaves or roots. Some need to be dried, others fresh. However, the essential ritual is always the same: macerate, boil, and let what the artist describes as a “body-to-body” encounter with the plant take place, filling her lungs and every pore with its presence. Lucila then tests these living dyes on animal fiber and paper. Finally, over the previously generated patterns, she intervenes by embroidering and weaving, daring to imagine a “more-than-human” dialogue that shifts her own artistic agency.

III

In Genealogía Vegetal (Plant Genealogy), her first exhibition at COTT Galería, Lucila explores traditional dyeing technologies used with two native trees of the Americas: the Brazilwood (Paubrasilia echinata) and Logwood (Haematoxylum campechianum), whose histories reveal how European colonization turned regions of “high biodiversity” into extractive territories, drastically and violently reorganizing life on our continent.

Driven by the high demand for the red dye extracted from its wood—which symbolized luxury in the European textile industry—the exploitation of Brazilwood marked the first wave of Portuguese occupation in the 16th century. The trade of this tree was so lucrative that early traders began calling the region “Land of Brazil” after the intense red color, giving the country its current name. Similarly, Logwood, also known as dye wood, was intensively exploited by the Spanish in the Yucatán Peninsula and other areas of Mesoamerica. Its wood was highly valued for producing purple tones, difficult to obtain with other plants.

The transformation of these trees into global commodities had devastating consequences: Indigenous communities were displaced and forced to work under semi-slavery conditions, while the natural environment suffered severe biodiversity loss. Although demand declined with the advent of synthetic dyes in the 19th century, the social and ecological scars remain, and both species are still protected today due to their historic overexploitation. Genealogía Vegetal offers a poetic perspective on these little-studied yet crucial episodes for understanding how extractive capitalism was established in Latin America. The exhibition comprises three groups of works in which Lucila tests the dyeing capabilities of these plants on various supports, allowing them to manifest through color and then engaging in a collaborative dialogue with them.

The textile pieces Palo Brasil (2024) and Palo Campeche (2024) are presented stretched on frames, acquiring a painterly quality. Both fabrics were immersed in plant dyes for several days, absorbing the characteristic gradient tones of reds and purples, which generate differentiated areas of color: darker and deeper at the top and bottom bands, softer in the center. On these surfaces, Lucila creates embroideries and stitches with wool in various colors. The embroideries interact with the color stains, tracing lines, crosses, and abstract forms that evoke, in some cases, natural elements like mountains, undulating landscapes, or water droplets.

Horizontes (2024) is a series of nine works on paper that the artist exposes to plant dyes inside a glass box for exactly twenty-four hours. The dyes rise uncontrollably, climbing and spreading across the paper, creating chance landscapes from soft gradients of pink tones that intensify toward the top. In the center of each piece, Lucila embroiders an undulating band in more vibrant tones, evoking a horizon and visually contrasting with the smooth surface. At the bottom, she weaves long wools that hang freely, adding a sense of fluidity and situating the works somewhere between drawing and textile.

Fusión (2024) is a “fibersculpture” made with especially light and translucent llama wool. Unlike cotton or paper, wool absorbs dyes more softly. The piece is based on a play of balances, exploring the weights and natural drape of the material. Combining red and purple tones, the wool forms gentle curves that fold onto themselves before opening again. The organic and fluid shape of the piece recalls female reproductive organs or even those of flowers, evoking the idea of fertility.

As a final gesture, Lucila has painted all the walls of COTT with a dye extracted from yerba mate, permeating the “white cube” with the essence of this master and sacred plant of South America. Known for its properties that foster dialogue and connection, yerba mate creates a dense background evoking the thickness of a tropical jungle, providing an environment for the other works to integrate and share their stories with us.

IV

Life on Earth is impossible without the agency of plants. Considering them as subjects of rights and care raises ethical questions that may seem untimely from a “technocapitalist” perspective. However, as María Puig de la Bellacasa⁴ points out, we cannot allow these productivist paradigms to define how we value the “non-human” systems that sustain our existence. Plants are world-makers, and we must pay attention to them if we want to create habitable futures. Yet, to recognize their essential qualities, we need to overcome “plant blindness”⁵, accept our deep interdependence, and expand our definitions of life and intelligence.

By relating to plants as teachers rather than mere resources, Lucila’s work envisions an approach to art that shifts from scientific rationality to relationality. Indeed, by studying their qualities, recognizing how their colonial histories intertwine with ours, granting them agency, and inviting them to collaborate, Lucila leads us to imagine a way of thinking that, for lack of better words, we might describe as “interspecies.” With this simple yet powerful gesture, she reminds us that we have been embedded in deep ecological assemblages since time immemorial. Thinking and feeling these assemblages as communities to which we belong also expands our political concerns beyond the limits of human supremacy.

Florencia Portocarrero, curator
November 2024