Margarete Maneker’s Reviews > The Chernobyl Herbarium: Fragments of an Exploded Consciousness > Status Update

The magical powers of Artemisia vulgaris have, alas,
floundered and heartbreak upon heartbreak, bodymindbreak upon bodymindbreak, are unhealed! The Chernobyl disaster is a mugwort disaster—not, to be sure, of the mugwort itself, but of our relation to it and, through it, to vegetal nature as, at once, a part and a condensed representation of nature as a whole.

Outside the purview of metaphysical philosophy that
treats it as a collection of simulacra, art respects time, or, perhaps, it rebels against time within time, serving as a paradoxical, non-dialectical medium for preservation-and-release. Art today is nothing, if not an emblem—being thrown into, emballein—of afterlife.

A herbarium of injured plants, damaged bodies, and traumatized minds germinates, in all its dry glory, from the same malignant source as the disaster, which has no power over it, however.

Now, to select, arrange, and display is to create a herbarium. Besides the plants that have grown in radioactive soil, the shards of our own exploded consciousness are reassembled in it, albeit not glued together—neither mended nor healed. In the fallen leaves and trees of Chernobyl, we can discern fragments of ourselves, of our bodies and thoughts.

True: it is difficult to talk about Chernobyl. Then why not delegate testimonial acts to living beings that do not speak, at least not in human voices and languages, except if they are characters in sundry myths and fairytales? Why not assign such acts to plants?

What did our exposure amount to?...Its common denominator was physicality itself, the brute fact of having a physical extension, open to everything, including radiation. This openness spelled out unfathomable vulnerability, the incapacity to defend oneself from a threat that was unknown and undetectable by the sensorium. One is ineluctably passive in the face of radioactivity.