They dance in the dark
Aluminum plate, wooden support structure, ceramic panel, ceramic work
2025
They Dance in the Dark is a newly commissioned work presented as a museological display centered on Mandragora (mandrake), the plant is a mysterious plant that has appeared in botanical compendiums since ancient times. As early as the 1st century, it was depicted as a hybrid creature with human-like features, reflecting the entangled relationship between plant anthropomorphism and female imagery. In the history of medicinal plants in the West, it has carried associations with hallucination and transformation, implicating ancient goddesses, witches, and maternal myths. Throughout the transmission of
eshold between hallucination and healing, death and rebirth. The mandrake often appears alongside female figures: from Hathor, the Egyptian goddess who embodies both fertility and destruction, to Circe, the Greek sorceress who used herbs to perform transformative magic, to the medieval witches accused of using mandrakes to make ointments for hallucinatory rituals or even for infanticide. These images and narratives together shaped the figure of the “witch” as a bearer of repressed knowledge and lunar energy. Women were long excluded from the male-centered writing of medicine and pharmacology, cast as the “Other” within systems of knowledge. The image of the witch became a convenient pretext for the witch hunts of the Middle Ages. But were these women merely imagined figures? Or were t
hey knowledge practitioners who learned from plants and enacted their wisdom through embodied rituals—whose contours became blurred by oral transmission and the absence of historical record? The anthropomorphic image of the mandrake functions as a mirror of these submerged narratives, reflecting those unspeakable feminine forces and collective memories. In these rituals and myths, the relationship between humans and plants is not one of dominance and subordination, but one of co-dancing, forming a mode of existence as a “hybrid subject.” The mandrake is not merely an herb, nor simply a species under botanical taxonomy, but a spiritual being that carries history, energy, hallucination, and mystical perception.
