Val Mucilaginosa
Val Mucilaginosa is a mixed-reality installation situated at the intersection of art, science and healing. It explores—and makes sensorially tangible—the relationship between biochemical forms of healing knowledge and relational, plant-based approaches to healing.
Flyer to the installation (PDF, 3 MB)
Val Mucilaginosa brings together the knowledge of medicinal plant practitioners and scientists, ethnobotanical and biochemical research, sensory media, and artistic speculation into an immersive experience. Rather than presenting knowledge as a series of conclusions or explanations, the installation stages plant-based healing as a relational, situated, and embodied process that is continuously negotiated between different forms of knowledge. At the centre of Val Mucilaginosa lies the question of how healing knowledge can emerge when scientific research, traditional plant practices, and artistic inquiry are allowed to encounter one another without one system being subordinated to the other.
The MR Installation as a Space of Knowledge
The design process began with conversations involving medicinal plant practitioners, phytotherapists, ethnobotanists, biochemists, medical researchers in Switzerland, and the artist Isabell Bullerschen. These conversations were understood as living encounters that shaped the conceptual and aesthetic development of the installation. Practitioners described plants as relational beings — entities that respond to place, season, care, and attention. Scientists described plants through molecular structures, metabolic processes, and biochemical signalling pathways. Rather than resolving these perspectives into a single explanatory model, the installation places them side by side, allowing their tensions, overlaps, and contradictions to remain productively present.
Isabell Bullerschen explains: “Many of the participants emphasised that knowledge does not arise through verbal explanation alone. Medicinal plant practitioners described learning as a process of years of observation, bodily attunement, ritual practice, and the daily care of plants. Scientists likewise spoke of intuition, curiosity, and aesthetic judgement as integral to their laboratory work — even within highly standardised methodologies. These insights led to the decision to develop an MR installation that privileges experience over instruction and co-presence over didactic mediation.”
The physical and virtual architecture of Val Mucilaginosa makes epistemic plurality sensuously tangible. In the physical space, two sculptural structures represent different yet interconnected systems of knowledge. One sculpture refers to rational phytotherapy and biochemistry: metallic structures, glass spheres, and three-dimensional images of cellular structures evoke laboratory environments and molecular visualisations. The other sculpture engages with relational and spiritual dimensions of healing: copper vessels, organic forms, ritual elements, and sensory stimuli such as scent and sound. A VR headset responds to the visitor’s position in the space. Depending on which sculpture participants approach, the virtual environment changes.
Multisensory Fabulation
In mixed reality, recipients enter two knowledge systems: Aetheris and Soma.[MD1.1] Aetheris is the world of relational healing knowledge — the healing power of plants grounded in relationship. It is an animated fabric of light, smoke, and vibration, stretching invisibly between all beings. Lichens suspended from ropes carry enamelled copper bowls with incense, rock crystals from Uri, and essential oil on water; from a steel bowl filled with mirror-like water, a neon helix rises towards the lowest lichen. Aetheris stands for that which eludes measurement. It is the world of circular, analogical thinking in correspondences, of the doctrine of signatures, and of plant power that arises in the relationship between healer, plant, and human being. It is based on the assumption that all beings are interconnected.
Soma is the world of rational phytotherapy: the world in which information becomes matter. A 3D-printed pedestal made of three ribosomes from a Nostoc cell supports a borosilicate glass flask with a glass helix, in which a noble gas mixture of krypton, argon, and mercury glows under voltage; around it stands a stainless-steel tubular structure threaded with fine silicone tubes. On the virtual level, we move through cryo-electron tomography data of cellular components from healing organisms: Rubisco, phycobilisomes, thylakoid membranes, starch granules, and ribosomes. Soma stands for the language shared by all living beings: biochemistry as material evidence of co-evolution, in which plants and humans emerge from the same molecular toolkit.
After recipients have had time to look around, particles begin to appear on each side and disembodied voices start to speak. These voices — perhaps those of a healer and a biochemist or ethnopharmacologist — activate the recipients. With their hands, they can move the particles and are invited to guide the carriers of healing information towards the sculptures: on the Aetheris side, these carriers are ephemeral and immaterial — fire, smoke, water, vibration; on the Soma side, they are molecules.
Through this interaction, the recipients awaken the active agents themselves: the healing spirit entities of both worlds. Once enough particles and molecules have been brought together, Aether Stomata appears in Aetheris and Nectar Xylan in Soma. Both are guardians: each a relational or biochemical intelligence that preserves and makes accessible the knowledge of efficacy. Efficacy is thus not passively received but arises through the encounter itself: healing emerges from relationship.
Only through the combination of both knowledge systems — through the meeting of Aether Stomata and Nectar Xylan — does one learn the secret of Viriditas. Efficacy occurs in both worlds through the movement of healing information; yet Viriditas is the point at which this efficacy becomes legible as knowledge. Moving between the worlds becomes a healing practice.
Viriditas is “where knowledge meets”. The term comes from Hildegard of Bingen: the greening power that flows through all creation, a metaphor for spiritual and physical health, and the foundation of all healing. Viriditas is pre-Cartesian. It is spirit and matter at once — not their subsequent synthesis, but the place where both have always already been intended together.
There, the recipients encounter Hydra Plasmodesma — the third and final healing spirit entity, an interdependent intelligence. Hydra awakens the memory of a shared past: the reason why phytotherapy works — the shared language of biochemistry and the therapeutic efficacy inscribed within it. The recipients recognise themselves as co-agents in the conditions of healing. Through their own bodies, through entering into relationship, they enter into relation with their own metabolism and with all living beings.
Toward Pluriversal Futures of Healing
Ultimately, Val Mucilaginosa is less concerned with answering questions than with reframing them. What counts as evidence? Who gets to define efficacy? How can different knowledge systems coexist without erasing one another? The installation suggests that the future of healing lies not in unifying models, but in cultivating spaces where multiple epistemologies can remain in dialogue.
Knowledge is not understood as a static object, but as a living process — one that unfolds through relationships, practices, and shared attention. In this sense, the installation is not merely a representation of research, but an extension of it: a space in which knowledge emerges through experience.
Text by Manuela Dahinden and Isabell Bullerschen
IMPRESSUM
Artist: Isabell Bullerschen
Experience Design: Chris Elvis Leisi
3D Design: Florian Baumann
Composition/Sound Design: Magda Drozd
Voice Over/Singing Voice: Hannah Mehler
Scent: Andreas Wilhelm
3D Printing: Benjamin Creek
Glass works: Glas Keller Basel, Neonatelier Bern Art
Assistant: Jordis Fellfrau
The project was developed in close exchange with herbal practitioners and scientists: Dr. Manuela Dahinden (Plant Science Center), Dr. Maja Dal Cero (University of Zurich), Elsbeth Frei (gardener and herbal practitioner), Prof. Jürg Gertsch (University of Bern), Dr. Andreas Lardos (ZHAW), Dr. med. Maja Oberholzer von Tolnai (herbal practitioner and researcher), Eidg. dipl. Apothekerin Nelly Richina (Berg-Apotheke), Dr. med. Dorin Ritzmann (herbal practitioner/researcher), and PD Dr. Caroline Weckerle (University of Zurich).
We were also honoured to work with 3D data provided by the CellarchLab at the Biozentrum, University of Basel. Special thanks go to Prof. Ben Engel, Dr. Ricardo Diogo Righetto, Dr. Annemarie Perez Boerema and Dr. Wojciech Wietrzysnki.
Curators: Martina Huber, We Are AIA; Dr. Manuela Dahinden and PD Dr. Caroline Weckerle, Botanical Garden of the University of Zurich
Commissioned by: We Are AIA for their project “Botanical Memories – On Healing and Care” & the Botanical Garden of the University of Zurich for “Plants as Medicine – Diversity in Switzerland”.
Co-creation: Immersive Art Space, Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK)
Funded by: Vontobel Stiftung, Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, Kanton Zürich Fachstelle Kultur, Stiftung Erna und Curt Burgauer