The artist duo aghili/karlsson welcomes you to a ritual featuring herbs, storytelling, and conversation.
aghili/karlsson perform recurring rituals as part of the duo’s work on cultivation and healing practices. In the duo’s garden, they grow herbs that hold the potential for both physical healing and emotional memory work. Through these rituals, which are open to anyone interested, femininity is explored and practiced as an aesthetic, a method, and a foundation for community. Femininity as a potential for sisterhood (which can include siblings of all genders)—that is, a system based on cooperation and support rather than competition and domination. In the rituals and the tea they serve, aghili/karlsson infuse the love and care they believe art needs to emphasize right now. Instead of embodying the polarization that is inscribed in our bodies, the duo seeks to create new, shared experiences that strengthen our sense of belonging and solidarity with others.
For the ritual at the Storytelling Festival, they’ll bring herbs that carry stories of exile, the exchange of knowledge, and ancestral traditions. All participants sit in a circle and serve each other tea in a ritual initiated and led by the artist duo. Conversation is welcome but not forced. Welcome!
aghili/karlsson is a collaboration between Nasim Aghili (artist, director, and playwright) and Björn Karlsson (artist, set designer, and landscape architect). They work in the fields of performing and visual arts and have spent over 15 years creating works in public spaces, performance pieces, and exhibitions. Their work often takes the form of conversations centered on experiences of living in various forms of exile and the need to grieve and heal. They are based in Stockholm and in the countryside outside Södertälje and frequently engage in international collaborations rooted in radical cultivation, decolonialism, and the aesthetics of sisterhood.
