Milena Bonilla’s seasonal workshop series Feral and Ruderals: History through the Cracks returns for a summer session focusing on the interconnection between colonial expansion and medical history.

Looking back at the long and layered history of our site as a modern hospital and, before that, as a plague house and asylum (Buitengasthuis), the workshop will dwell on the 19th-century plan to transform the secluded Buitengasthuis into Amsterdam’s ethnographic museum. What does this unrealized project tell us?

Guided once again by the intelligence and knowledge of the plants spontaneously growing on the site, we will consider three types of VOC cash crops used in the context of medicine in the Netherlands, reflecting on how the development of industrial capitalism and modern medicine went hand in hand with the establishment of plantation economies across the tropical and subtropical regions of the world.

The workshop includes a transhistorical tour of the site and concludes with an oracular reading at f If I Can’t Dance.