Bitter Herb, Healing Hands explores how ecological knowledge is remembered, carried and transformed through rural traditions and everyday acts of care. In an increasingly changeable world, shaped by technological, socio-political and climatic shifts, the exhibition considers how knowledge is passed between generations through informal archives - gestures, stories, recipes, landscapes, food and relationships. These forms of knowledge are rarely fixed or formally documented. Instead, they are lived, repeated and adapted, embedded within the rhythms of everyday life. This collection of works considers how we hold on to this embodied knowledge. This might happen through material forms such as herbs, foods and tinctures, or through acts of remembering and sharing, such as moving image, storytelling and making. Bringing these different forms together, Bitter Herb, Healing Hands asks what survives, what changes and what is lost. Ana Hušman’s film I Would Rather Be a Stone surveys the ecological surroundings of Lika, a neglected and sparsely populated region of Croatia. Narrated by the protagonist Little Jela, an embodiment of generations of women from Hušman’s family, the film follows the changing landscape of dense forest and lichen-covered rocks in the wake of the construction of a new hydroelectric power plant in the Kosinj Valley. Lika was heavily affected during the Second World War. Its population was poor and the land difficult to cultivate, and much of the generation born in the 1940s subsequently moved to the cities. More recently, the construction of the Kosinj Hydroelectric Power Plant threatens to submerge two villages by 2028 - Gornji Kosinj and Mlakva. Places that once supported more than a thousand inhabitants have already dwindled to barely 150 permanent residents. Kosinj is a landscape in which people, agriculture, plants and the surrounding environment have developed together over centuries. Flooding the valley will mean removing not only buildings, but the context in which many of these practices have meaning. Hušman’s film captures this tension of cohabitation, where human and non-human lives exist alongside one another within a landscape undergoing irreversible change. Here, memory becomes phenomenological, shaped by the subjective experience of time. For the forest, memory is long, stretching across generations; for the power plant, it is fast and disruptive. Hušman examines how memories are constructed and how they fracture, using cinematic techniques that echo this fragmentation. Lichen becomes a quiet constant within the film - seemingly immobile, persisting through a landscape in revision. In contrast, Cigdem Boru’s The Season We Keep is colourful and immediate, filmed only a few weeks ago during harvest season in Türkiye. Drawing on her Pomak heritage, Boru traces the continuation of domestic rituals carried across generations through the Balkan diaspora. The work moves from her grandmother’s handmade lace and embroidery, to her mother’s cultivation of the land, and finally to the artist’s own acts of observing, documenting and reinterpreting. Set in the artist’s mother’s garden, we follow acts of growing, harvesting, preparing, drying and storing food for the months ahead. The women talk and work as though the tasks are second nature. Their shared labour, interwoven with laughter and conversation, reveals a sense of intimacy and matriarchal connection. Through these everyday acts, their relationships to the land and to one another become visible. Compositionally echoing Hušman’s work, The Season We Keep layers and interweaves imagery, symbols and objects to trace generations of female memory. Boru’s work asks how ancestral knowledge, often carried through everyday, multisensorial acts, might be captured without losing its texture, authenticity and ambiguity. Rather than attempting to hold time still, The Season We Keep understands continuity as something active. What passes from grandmother to mother to daughter changes as it moves, shaped by nature, renewed with each season, carried forward through everyday life. This movement between language, plants and lived experience is echoed in Karla Crnčević’s Love From the Border. The work takes the form of three letters, each addressed to a plant or flower. Alongside the writing, the plants themselves are dried and presented as part of the work. Originally produced as part of BAR Bidasoa Art Room, Bitamine’s residency programme in 2023, Love From the Border has been recontextualised for Bitter Herb, Healing Hands, with many of its references taking on expanded meanings in the landscape of Split. Here, the letters become a way of acknowledging the present - wildfires spreading along the coast, the recent ecological crisis in Lika. The plants themselves become carriers across borders, connecting places, memories and histories. Crnčević considers how we classify and remember the natural world, and how these acts of classification are shaped by the social, cultural and political frameworks through which we understand it. By addressing plants directly, the work challenges the distance usually present between the botanist and their sample. The plants become subjects with which to correspond, rather than objects to describe. Further, the act of writing to them creates a relationship based on attention, encounter and exchange. Armina Pilav’s workshop Island Food in 52.143 Seasons extends the exhibition through taste, scent and touch. Drawing on the agroecological practices of Pilav’s family business, Divja Herbal Crafts OPG, and their relationship with the land on Brač, the workshop explores the wild herbs and fruits of the island through healing remedies and food-making. The title reflects the many rhythms of Brač’s local food system and the knowledge held within it. Foraging, cultivating olives, almonds, figs, lavender, helichrysum, cherries, citrus, grapes and more, as well as caring for sheep and goats and making cheese, are all part of an ongoing relationship with the land. These practices embody knowledge that is learned through doing and shared through everyday life. Through tasting and exploring herbal remedies and foods made through traditional processes, participants encounter ecological knowledge as something to experience, share and carry forward. Across these works, what survives is not a fixed record of the past, but knowledge continually reshaped through memory, relationships and the land we share. ____ Amy Melling is a curator and producer whose practice explores the intersection of ecology, place-based knowledge and contemporary art. She is interested in how knowledge is carried beyond institutions through memory, movement and oral histories. Alongside her independent practice, Amy is a member of the curatorial collective Shed Project, which has delivered exhibitions and projects as part of Folkestone Triennial and Wandsworth Arts Fringe, and in collaboration with SLaM NHS Foundation Trust. She is also Exhibitions Producer at London College of Communication, where she stewards the university's gallery programme, supporting exhibitions as sites for learning, experimentation and collective enquiry. Cigdem Boru is a London-based visual artist working across photography, still life, and installation. Her practice explores memory, material culture, and female identity through inherited objects, domestic rituals, and cultural symbolism rooted in her Pomak heritage and the wider Balkan region. Her work reflects on themes of cultural inheritance, women’s labour, ritual, and belonging, transforming familiar domestic materials into contemporary visual narratives that connect personal experience with collective mythology. Cigdem holds an MA in Fine Art Photography from London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. Her work has been exhibited in the UK and internationally, bringing together photography, installation, and material-based practices to explore the relationship between cultural memory and contemporary visual language.  ​Karla Crnčević is a filmmaker and dramaturg whose practice is situated at the intersection of cinema, archives, and spaces of memory. She works across cinema, research, and curating, and is one of the founders and programmers of KINO UNSEEN, a platform dedicated to rethinking film circulation, cultural policies, and the reactivation of cinema spaces as places of encounter. Her work moves between documentary and experimental forms, often through collaborative and process-based approaches.  Ana Hušman’s practice disassembles the structures and textures of cinematic elements through film, installation, books, sound, image and text. Hušman experiments with the possibilities of animation, documentary and fictional cinematic methods, and the possibilities of the recorded voice and its articulation. Her working process questions and plays with the positions of the amateur and the professional subject of performativity, the medium itself, and the structures that dictate and produce patterns of behavior. She is Professor at the Department of New Media at the Academy of Fine Art in Zagreb, cofounder of the documentary film organization RESTART where she has been holding film education programs for children and young people for many years. Armina Pilav is conceptual architect, artist, herbalist and artisan cook based in Ložišća on the Island of Brač. Her land practice evolves in the Divja Plant Sanctuary and OPG Divja where together with her family, she is taking care of 200 olive trees, forage wild plants and fruits. In the home garden she cultivates different medicinal plants and vegetables. Following all year round cultivating and foraging of herbs and fruits, intentionally small EV olive oil production, Armina also produces herbal remedies, natural cosmetics, fermented and vegan/vegetarian food made only from the local products. Her interests in the island food systems brought her attention to the traditional methods of food preservation, plants diary writing, observation of climate and technological impacts on the everyday food production, edible herbarium making, hosting cooking and herbal workshops, shared tables and narratives about the island landscape and food. _____ The programme is supported by the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia and the City of Split