JATROPHA CURCAS (OR WHAT MY AUNTIE CALLS THE PHYSIC NUT TREE)

Created by Alexandria Douziech, founder of the Center for Plants & Culture

October, 2022

I first came across the Jatropha curcas plant when I was staying with my great auntie in Guyana. She gave me a decoction made from its boiled leaves and said it’s “gud fuh de bady.” While drinking what tasted like weak black tea, I learned about the plant’s apotropaic qualities and how its sap turns blood red on Good Friday. This experience and conversation inspired my project, “Jatropha curcas (or what my auntie calls the physic nut tree)”…

Designed as both a sculpture and mobile exhibition, “Jatropha curcas (or what my auntie calls the physic nut tree),” draws upon personal and familial experiences to reveal Jatropha's evolution from Obeah spiritual and medicinal remedy, to colonial import, to Christian symbol, to “miracle” biofuel. Unlike most botanical exhibitions that examine plants solely through the eyes of historians and botanists, this project offers perspectives from those who’ve long been excluded, disregarded, or “spoken for” by academia. To further personalize the project, Alexandria invites the public to ask questions and share their own plant histories and stories.

This mobile exhibition has exhibited at the Los Angeles Valley College in Van Nuys, CA (Oct. 5th, 2022) and at Latinx with Plants in Boyle Heights, CA (Oct. 22nd, 2022).

Special thanks to Jenene Nagy and Andi Xoch