Guerrilla Drugstore is a street pharmacy of plants that were forgotten, invisibilized, oppressed, and capitalized, and that are being born from Barcelona outwards, through a self-managed network of beings, plants and humans, and care. 

“La cura como arte” (“healing as art”) could be the motto of the project, being “cura” a word that in Italian and Catalan means care and healing. 

Artemisia annua, Matricaria chamomilla, Ocimum tenuiflorum, Nicotiana tabacum, these are some of the remedies of the pharmacy that were chosen for their therapeutic powers as well as for the financial interests of the pharmaceutical lobbies behind them. 

The construction of the pharmacy is thought as an expanding network that spreads rhizomatically through the city, occupying empty lots, municipal gardens, weaving in the interstices of the neighbourhoods together with the complicity of people met in the street, some communities and institutions of the city.

Each site of the pharmacy has a plant or family of plants to care for. The plant is chosen in dialogue between the healing powers of the plant and the nature of the place where the point arises.  

Guerrilla Drugstore, can be seen as an exercise of urban acupuncture; an attempt to heal our body and at the same time to heal the body of the city, through punctual interventions which in synergy with each other, create a weave of healing and care across the city and its ground. Because as Ailton Krenak says, if the earth gets sick, so does our body.

The project can also be read as a poetic-political embodiment of love and rebellion to support practices of autonomy on health, in time of covid-19 and beyond.

Guerrilla Drugstore has the hope (which can be understood as a technology) to enact alliances between plants and humans in order to decapitalise, decolonise and depatriarchalizing bodies, and thus lives.

Born in 2020 within the framework of the Independent Studies Programme of Macba, the project is currently in progress, and has been presented at VI Encuentro Cultura y Ciudadanía- Ecológia, La Escocesa- Barcelona, Faculdade de Bellas Artes- Universidad Complutense among the others.