The Brazilian communitarian project Teia dos Povos offers an integrative approach to plant knowledge, where a combination of theoretical, practical, bodily, and ritual practices compose an embodied learning experience. 

The workshop emerges from the Universidade dos Povos, the university of the people, where CosmoAngola is a central way of understanding and knowing the land and what it offers. CosmoAngola combines embodied movement (capoeira) with vegetal gardening, agroforestry, instrument making, song, and storytelling. These forms of embodied knowledge making are shared to empower Berlin-based practitioners to partake in new relations to terrain and territory. 

As part of the workshop, a garden of medicinal herbs is planted in HKW’s Lili Elbe Garden based on the permaculture principle of unity in diversity, offering a framework to learn about ancestral plants and their healing power, about antagonistic and companion plants, and how these traditional knowledges are at the heart of the fight for environmental and land justice in Brazil. 

The workshop ends with a public event at HKW’s Haunani Kay Trask Hall, during which workshop leaders share and engage with the Berlin community. The conversation is open to all, with presentation and discussions around the concerns and work of Teia dos Povos situated in the Brazilian system of colonial land relations. Reflecting on the search for sovereignty in the plural: water, food, energy, education and even self-defence, this discussion aims to link these themes with spirituality, traditional knowledges, and practices of relating the body to the land.

The workshop is conceived by the mentors in the Growing phase of A Participatory Planet, Elders of Teia dos Povos, Cinézio Feliciano Peçanha alias Cobra Mansa, and Joelson Ferreira