My name is Lora Aziz. I am an artist and wildcrafter. On the wall to the left of this stop is a collage of around 50 items including photographs, journal pages, tapestries and drawings. These were created by young people from the valleys around St Catherine, a town in the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt.
As part of this project I worked with young people aged 8 – 18 to explore practices like ethnobotany and citizen science. The aim was to give the participants the means to document their landscape and the nature around them, to make them the co-creators of a living archive of the flora and fauna of their home.
Sinai is a region undergoing rapid change and urbanisation. This makes the transfer and preservation of local knowledge around plants of critical importance. Their stories and traditional uses are held with the elders, and risk slowly dwindling away without the means of preserving them and engaging the next generation.
Our tools for this were simple. We used materials like notebooks, foraged plants, soil, old scraps of paper and photography to teach the participants to make prints, tapestries and journals. There is an example of this on the lower left-hand side of the collage, a journal page made by a girl called Sohir. This is a page of a notebook with blue writing in Arabic script above and below a photograph of an arid mountain - the blue sky above is streaked with a few high clouds. A palm leaf collected by the participant is glued to the left-hand side of the page.
A large part of our practice was teaching the groups to create with the materials available in the region. In the centre of the arrangement are two sheets of overlapping paper. The one on top shows various square test patches of colour in beige tones, ranging from pale primrose yellow to ground ginger. This is a colour key for Valley Gharba using ink created from plant matter and stones next to the workshop area, as well as coffee grounds and charcoal from the fire the night before. As many of these materials are organic (with little to preserve them), the colours have faded a little with time.
On either side of this colour key, mounted to the wall, are pieces of rock from the mountain side, walnut ink and a hawthorn tincture in glass bottles. In a remote area where shop-bought art materials can be hard to access, it can be empowering to create from the natural abundance around you, with some local knowledge of the land and traditional techniques.
In some of the drawing workshops, we had the participants go out with a viewfinder, look at the mountainscape, then draw what they saw. Some people would draw the mountains, but Mohammed, instead sketched a landscape filled with plants and animals. I gave Mohammed’s drawing to 18-year Nora, and she embroidered them into two tapestries. These can be found on the left-hand side, hanging at about eye level, each about the size of an A3 poster.
The one on the left shows the arid mountain in the bottom left-hand corner. As it slopes down to ground level towards the right, you can see a drawing of a pomegranate tree in flower. A pink lizard and a donkey are lying nearby, together with a snake and an olive leaf branch. On the far side of the valley a single-humped camel meets two birds - one a dusky pink, the other black. Some of the threads Nora used were hand dyed using locally available plant dyes.
Bedouins have been guardians of the Sinai land and environment for thousands of years, but it becomes tricky to protect a landscape when the climate is changing, global politics is changing, and capitalism is in every corner. In these circumstances and in the grand scale we have to ask: how do you protect your land in conditions which are changing so rapidly? That's why this creative practice is so important, and it needs to be nurtured, protected and communicated properly. People need new tools to think and talk about the land for the ever-changing climate and future.
To the right is a cabinet with 4 kilner jars, containing dried herbs from St Catherine. From left to right they are: Horse Mint, Wild Mountain Tea, Judean Wormwood and Mountain Sage. The jars are stuck down but you can lift the lids off to smell the contents. I would like to talk about one of these herbs, a sample of Judean Wormwood in the third jar from the left.
When you smell this variety of Wormwood, this is what mountains of Sinai smell like. Especially after the rain or the wind has shaken some of those plants and released the aromas into the air. It’s pungent and sharp, but also sweet and addictive. The kind of scent that goes into your nostrils and lingers.
During Covid in 2021, Sinai had the first prolonged rainfall in a long time. Every year in Sinai there is the wait for the rain towards the end of winter. At this point there had been a decades-long drought, but this year it just rained and rained and rained. The valleys became rivers, water flowed down the mountains, gushing down in waterfalls. It was beautiful.
It meant that all those seeds that had laid dormant for years on the sides of the mountain were able to germinate that year, and the plant life flourished. The blue butterfly returned and life just … renewed. Local wormwood varieties emerged and were found to effectively treat the Covid variant, Omicron. This resonates with the local belief that for every disease that emerges, nature will offer a cure. Again, the word abundance is what rings true for me at this point!
This is end of Stop 5.